“I just thought it was strange, that’s all. A woman learning how to kill…”
She raised an eyebrow at that. “You are old-fashioned, aren’t you, Yassen! And here’s another piece of advice. Maybe you should keep your opinions to yourself.” She looked at her watch, then drew a thin book out of her back pocket. “Now I’m afraid I’m going to have to leave you on your own. I’ve got to finish this.”
I glanced at the cover: MODERN INTERROGATION TECHNIQUES BY DR THREE.
“You might get to meet him one day,” Colette said. “And if you do, be careful what you say. You wouldn’t want to end up as a chapter in his book.”
I spent the rest of the day alone in my room, lying on my bed with all sorts of thoughts going through my head. Much later on, at about eight o’clock in the evening, I was summoned to the headmaster’s office and it was there that I met the man who was in charge of all the training on Malagosto.
His name was Sefton Nye and my first thought was that he had the darkest skin I had ever seen. His glistening bald head showed off eyes that were extraordinarily large and animated. And he had brilliant white teeth, which he displayed often in an astonishing smile. He dressed very carefully – he liked well-cut blazers, obviously expensive – and his shoes were polished to perfection. He was originally from Somalia. His family were modern-day pirates, holding up luxury yachts, cruise ships and even, on one occasion, an oil tanker that had strayed too close to the shore. They were utterly ruthless… I saw framed newspaper articles in the office describing their exploits. Nye himself had a very loud voice. Everything about him was larger than life.
“Yassen Gregorovich!” he exclaimed, pointing me to a chair in the office, which was almost circular with an iron chandelier in the middle. There were floor to ceiling bookshelves, two windows looking out over woodland, and half a dozen clocks, each one showing a different time. A pair of solid iron filing cabinets stood against one wall. Mr Nye wore the key that opened them around his neck. “Welcome to Malagosto,” he went on. “Welcome indeed. I always take the greatest pleasure in meeting the new recruits because, you see, when you leave here you will not be the same. We are going to turn you into something very special and when I meet you after that, it may well be that I do not want to. You will be dangerous. I will be afraid of you. Everyone who meets you, even without knowing why, will be afraid of you. I hope that thought does not distress you, Yassen, because if it does you should not be here. You are going to become a contract killer and although you will be rich and you will be comfortable, I am telling you now, it is a very lonely path.”
There was a knock at the door and a second man appeared, barely half the height of the headmaster, dressed in a linen suit and brown shoes, with a round face and a small beard. He seemed quite nervous of Mr Nye, his eyes blinking behind his tortoise-shell glasses. “You wanted to see me, headmaster?” he enquired. He had a French accent, much more distinct than Colette’s.
“Ah yes, Oliver!” He gestured in my direction. “This is our newest recruit. His name is Yassen Gregorovich. Mrs Rothman sent him over from the Widow’s Palace.”
“Delighted.” The little man nodded at me.
“This is Oliver d’Arc. He will be your personal tutor and he will also be taking many of your classes. If you’re unhappy, if you have any problems, you go to him.”
“Thank you,” I said, but I had already decided that if I had any problems I would most certainly keep them to myself. This was the sort of place where any weakness would only be used against you.
“I am here for you any time you need me,” d’Arc assured me.
I would spend a lot of time with Oliver d’Arc while I was on Malagosto but I never completely trusted him. I don’t think I ever knew him. Everything about him – his appearance, the way he spoke, probably even his name – was an act put on for the students’ benefit. Later on, after Nye was killed by one of his own students, d’Arc became the headmaster and, by all accounts, he was very good at the job.
“Do you have any questions, Yassen?” Mr Nye asked.
“No, sir,” I said.
“That’s good. But before you turn in for the night, there’s something I want you to do for me, I hope you don’t mind. It shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours.”
That was when I noticed that Oliver d’Arc was holding a spade.
My first job on Malagosto was to bury Mr Grant in the little cemetery in the woods. It was a final resting place that he would share with plague victims who had died four hundred years before him, although I had no doubt that there were other more recent arrivals too, men and women who had failed Scorpia just like him. It was an unpleasant, grisly task, digging on my own in the darkness. Even Sharkovsky had never asked me to do such a thing – but it’s possible that it was meant to be a warning to me. Mrs Rothman had let me live. She had even recruited me. But this is what I could look forward to if I let her down.
As I dragged Mr Grant off the stretcher and tipped him into the hole which I had dug, I couldn’t help but wonder if someone would do the same for me one day. For what it’s worth, it is the only time I have ever had such thoughts. When your business is death, the only death you should never consider is your own. It had begun to rain slightly, a thin drizzle that only made my task more unpleasant. I filled in the grave, flattened it with the spade, then carried the stretcher back to the main complex. Oliver d’Arc was waiting for me with a brandy and a hot chocolate. He escorted me to my room and even insisted on running a bath for me, adding a good measure of “Floris of London” bath oil to the foaming water. I was glad when he finally left. I was afraid he was going to offer to scrub my back.
Five months…
No two days were ever exactly the same, although we were always woken at half past five in the morning for a one-hour run around the island followed by a forty-minute swim – out to a stump of rock and back again. Breakfast was at half past seven, served in a beautiful dining room with a sixteenth-century mosaic on the floor, wooden angels carved around the windows and a faded view of heaven painted on the domed ceiling above our heads. The food was always excellent. All four students ate together and I usually found myself sitting next to Colette. As she had warned me, Marat and Sam weren’t exactly unfriendly but they hardly ever spoke to me. Sam was dark and very intense. Marat seemed more laid-back, sitting in class with his legs crossed and his hands behind his back. After they had graduated, they decided to work together as a team and were extremely successful but I never saw them again.
Morning lessons took place in the classrooms. We learned about guns and knives, how to create a booby trap, and how to make a bomb using seven different ingredients that you could find in any supermarket. There was one teacher – he was red-headed, scrawny and had tattoos all over his upper body – who brought in a different weapon for us to practice with every day: not just guns but knives, swords, throwing spikes, ninja fighting fans and even a medieval crossbow … he actually insisted on firing an apple off Marat’s head. His name was Gordon Ross and he came from a city called Glasgow, in Scotland. He had briefly been assistant to the Chief Armourer at MI6 until Scorpia had tempted him away at five times his original salary.
The first time we met, I impressed him by stripping down an AK-47 machine gun in eighteen seconds. My old friend Leo, of course, would have done it faster. Ross was actually a knife man. His two great heroes were William Fairbairn and Eric Sykes, who together had created the ultimate fighting knife for British commandos during the Second World War. Ross was an expert with throwing knives and he’d had a set specially designed and weighted for his hand. Put him twenty metres from a target and there wasn’t a student on the island who could beat him for speed or accuracy, even when he was competing against guns.
Ross also had a fascination with gadgets. He didn’t manufacture any himself but he had made a study of the secret weaponry provided by all the different intelligence services and he had managed to steal several items, which he brought in for us to e
xamine. There was a credit card developed by the CIA. One edge was razor-sharp. The French had come up with a string of onions … several of them were grenades. His own employers, MI6, had provided an antiseptic cream that could eat through metals, a fountain pen that fired a poisoned nib, and a Power Plus battery that concealed a radio transmitter. You simply gave the whole thing a half-twist and it would set off a beacon to summon immediate help. All these devices amused him but at the end of the day he dismissed them as toys. He preferred his knives.
Weapons and self-defence were only part of my training. I was surprised to find myself going back to school in the old-fashioned sense; I learned maths, English, Arabic, science – even classical music, art and cookery. Oliver d’Arc took some of these classes. However, I will not forget the day I was introduced to the unsmiling Italian woman who never told anyone her name but called herself the Countess. It may well be that she was a true aristocrat. She certainly behaved like one, insisting that we stand when she entered and always address her as “ma’am”. She was about fifty, exquisitely dressed, with expensive jewellery and perfect manners. When she stood up, she expected us to do so too. The Countess took us shopping and to art galleries in Venice. She made us read newspapers and celebrity magazines and often talked about the people in the photographs. At first, I had absolutely no idea what she was doing on the island.
It was only later that I understood. A killer is not just someone who lies on a roof with a 12.7mm sniper rifle, waiting for his prey to walk out of a restaurant. Sometimes it is necessary to be inside that restaurant. To pin down your target, you have to get close to him. You have to wear the right clothes, walk in the right way, demand a good table in a restaurant, understand the food and the wine. How could a boy from a poor Russian village have been able to do any of these things if he had not been taught? I have been to art auctions, to operas, to fashion shows and to horse races. I have sipped champagne with bankers, professors, designers and multimillionaires. I have always felt comfortable and nobody has ever thought I was out of place. For this, I have the Countess to thank.
The toughest part of the day came after lunch. The afternoons were devoted to hand-to-hand combat and three-hour classes were taken either by the headmaster, Mr Nye, or a Japanese instructor, Hatsumi Saburo. We all called him HS and he was an extraordinary man. He must have been seventy years old but he moved faster than a teenager, certainly faster than me. If you weren’t concentrating, he would knock you down so hard and so fast that you simply wouldn’t be aware of what had happened until you were on the floor, and he would be standing above you, gazing at the ceiling, as if it had been nothing to do with him. Sefton Nye taught judo and karate but it was Hatsumi Saburo who introduced me to a third martial art, ninjutsu, and it is this that has always stayed with me.
Ninjutsu was the fighting method developed by the ninjas, the spies and the assassins who roamed across Japan in the fifteenth century. It was taught to them by the priests and the warriors who were in hiding in the mountains. What I learned from HS over the next five months was what I can only describe as a total fighting system that encompassed every part of my body including my feet, my knees, my elbows, my fists, my head, even my teeth. And it was more than that. He used to talk about nagare, the flow of technique … knowing when to move from one form of attack to the next. Ultimately, everything came down to mental attitude. “You cannot win if you do not believe you will win,” he once said to me. He had a very heavy Japanese accent and barked like a dog. “You must control your emotions. You must control your feelings. If there is any fear or insecurity, you must destroy it before it destroys you. It is not the size or the strength of your opponent that matters. These can be measured. It is what cannot be measured … courage, determination … that count.”
I felt great reverence for Hatsumi Saburo but I did not like him. Sometimes we would fight each other with wooden swords that were known as bokken. He never held back. When I went to bed, my whole body would be black and blue, while I would never so much as touch him. “You have too many emotions, Yas-sen!” he would crow, as he stood over me. “All that sadness. All that anger. It is the smoke that gets into your eyes. If you do not blow it away how can you hope to see?”
Was I sad about what had happened to me? Was I angry? I suppose Scorpia would know better than me because, just as Mrs Rothman had promised, I was given regular psychological examinations by a doctor called Karl Steiner who came from South Africa. I disliked him from the start; the way he looked at me, his eyes always boring into mine as if he suspected that everything I said was a lie. I don’t think I ever heard Dr Steiner say anything that wasn’t a question. He was a very neat man, always dressed in a suit with a carnation in his lapel. He would sit there with one leg crossed over the other, occasionally glancing at a gold pocket watch to check the time. His office was completely bare … just a white space with two armchairs. It had a window that looked out over the firing range and I would sometimes hear the crack of the rifles outside as he fired his own questions my way.
I regretted now that I had told Mrs Rothman so much about myself. She had passed all the information to him and he wanted me to talk about my parents, my grandmother, my childhood in Estrov. The more we talked, the less I wanted to say. I felt empty, as if the life I was describing was something that no longer belonged to me. And the strange thing is, I think that was exactly what he wanted. In his own way he was just like Hatsumi Saburo. My old life was smoke. It had to be blown away.
We were given a couple of hours of rest before dinner but we were always expected to use the time productively. My tutor, Oliver d’Arc, insisted that I read books … and in English, not Russian. Some evenings we had political discussions. I learned more about my own country while I was on the island than I had the whole time I was living there.
We also had guest lecturers. They were brought to Malagosto in blindfolds and many of them had been in prison but they were all experts in their own field. One was a pickpocket … he shook hands with each one of us before he began and then started his lecture by returning our watches. Another showed us how to pick locks. There was one really brilliant lecture by an elderly Hungarian man with terrible scars down the side of his face. He had lost his sight in a car accident. He talked to us for two hours about disguise and false identities, and then revealed that he was actually a thirty-two-year-old Belgian woman and that she could see as well as any of us.
You never knew what was going to happen. The school loved to throw surprises our way. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, a whistle would blow and we would find ourselves called out to the assault course, crawling through the rain and the mud, climbing nets and swinging on ropes while Mr Ross fired live ammunition at our heels. Once, we were told to swim to the mainland, to steal clothes and money when we got there and then to make our own way back.
But Scorpia did not want us to become too cut off, too removed from the real world. As well as the expeditions with the Countess, they often gave us half a day off to visit Venice. Marat and Sam kept themselves to themselves so I usually found myself with Colette. We would go to the markets together and walk the streets. She was always stopping to take photographs. She loved little details … an iron door handle, a gargoyle, a cat asleep on a windowsill. I had never been out with a girl before – I had never really had the chance – and I found myself being drawn to her in a way I could not completely understand. All the time, I was being taught to hide my feelings. When I was with her, I wanted to do the opposite.
She never told me much more about herself than she had that first time we had met and I was sensible enough not to ask. She let slip that she had once lived in Paris, that her father was something to do with the French government and that she hadn’t spoken to him for years. She had left home when she was very young and had somehow survived on her own since then. She never explained how she had found out about Scorpia. But I did learn that her training would be over very soon. Like all recruits, she was going to be sent on he
r first solo kill – a real job with a real target.
“Do you ever think about it?” I asked her.
We were sitting outside a café on the Riva degli Schiavoni with a great expanse of water in front of us and hundreds of tourists streaming past. They gave us privacy.
“What?” she asked.
I lowered my voice. “Killing. Taking another person’s life.”
She looked at me over the top of her coffee. She was wearing sunglasses which hid her eyes but I could tell she was annoyed. “You should ask Dr Steiner about that.”
I held her gaze. “I’m asking you.”
“Why do you even want to know?” she snapped. She stirred the coffee. It was very black, served in a tiny cup. “It’s a job. There are all sorts of people who don’t deserve to live. Rich people. Powerful people. Take one of them out, maybe you’re doing the world a favour.”
“What if they’re married?”
“Who cares?”
“What if they have children?”
“If you think like that, you shouldn’t be here. You shouldn’t even be talking like this. If you were to say any of this to Marat or Sam, they’d go straight to Mr Nye.”
“I wouldn’t talk to them,” I said. “They’re not my friends.”
“And you think I am?”
I still remember that moment. Colette was leaning towards me and she was wearing a jacket with a very soft, close-fitting jersey beneath. She took off her sunglasses and looked at me with brown eyes that, I’m sure, had more warmth in them than she intended. Right then, I wished that we could be just like all the other people strolling by us; a Russian boy and a French girl who had just happened to bump into each other in one of the most romantic places on the earth. But of course it couldn’t be. It would never be.
“I’m not your friend,” she said. “We’ll never have friends, Yassen. Either of us.”
Russian Roulette: The Story of an Assassin Page 19