by Mark Mills
“Good, because now there are children involved.”
She looked shocked by the intimation. “I would never …”
“And I would never let you.”
Lying in the same bed he had been bound to last night, he didn’t even try to make sense of the day’s bizarre events. It brought to mind the summer haze that would spring up over the plain south of Miranshah, the strange miasma of heat and dust that thickened suddenly to a soup until you found yourself flying blind, reliant on your instruments. That was all he could do now: stay focused on what lay directly in front of his nose, get through tomorrow, and then get himself to Zurich.
He knew that tomorrow would not be without its dangers and its surprises. Pippi was running a couple of potentially conflicting agendas in parallel. She wanted the traitor whose betrayal had led to Johan’s death, and she also wanted the man who had actually taken her boyfriend’s life. It remained to be seen exactly how she intended to achieve both objectives while safely extracting Professor Weintraub and his family, but Luke was beginning to understand why she had worked so hard to convince him to stay on. She couldn’t reasonably hope to pull it off without an accomplice.
That thought gave him pause.
Could it be that Pippi was playing him for her own purposes? That she had thrown together her theory linking the attempt on his life to Agnes’ death just to persuade him to stick around? He wouldn’t put it past her. She was a skilled dissembler. There had been nothing in her conduct over dinner to hint at the suspicions she harbored about Otto and Erwin. She had fed them and laughed away with them, while no doubt searching for signs and clues in their behavior. He had done the same, imagining at first that it must be Otto, with his streak of ruthlessness and his gaunt good looks, before leaning more toward young, overstrung, impressionable Erwin. It was odd to think that by this time tomorrow, he would know the answer.
As sleep closed in on him, he found himself groping for stray scraps of knowledge about Croatia. It was the place where all roads seemed to lead: Borodin, a Croat based in Paris, instructed by his Croatian crime bosses to snuff out the life of an Englishman whose complexion and coloring were far from English.
He knew that Croatia faced Italy across the Adriatic, that it was renowned for the beauty of its coastline, that the Venetian Republic had once had some sort of presence there, and that after the last war, the country had banded together with Serbia and Slovenia to form what was now called the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. He also recalled that a few years ago, King Alexander of Yugoslavia had been assassinated in Marseille.
A foreigner murdered on French soil by his own people.
It was beginning to look as though Luke himself had narrowly avoided the same fate.
Chapter Fourteen
Damp with sweat, Borodin lay on his back and stared at the ceiling fan’s valiant efforts to generate a downdraft.
It was a miserable room—poky, filthy, and poorly furnished—and yet it seemed somehow appropriate. He had spent his first ever night in Paris in such a place. Why not his last? It lent a satisfying circularity to his twelve-year sojourn in the French capital.
He hadn’t been ordered to move to Paris, but Budapest had become too hot to hold him, and when a vacancy popped up after the brutal murder of Malovic, he had put his name forward for the posting. A firm hand was required to restore the organization’s interests following the takeover of its smuggling operation by a rival Portuguese gang. This had come about, Borodin soon discovered, from the collaboration of two detectives in the Sûreté—Malovic perishing in a hail of bullets while supposedly resisting arrest.
Borodin did what he had always done: he stayed in the shadows, and when he struck, he did so swiftly, without relish or ceremony. The detectives were the first to die, on the direct orders of the Karaman brothers. Impressively, the Portuguese didn’t panic after losing their protection—not until Borodin began picking them off one by one. He saved their leader, Farinha, until last, and only then did he show his face, contriving a meeting in one of the Breton bars around Rue du Dragon—an apparently chance encounter between two strangers. The ultimatum, when he finally presented it to the wiry scrap of a man with pomaded hair, was both succinct and reasonable: if he received a postcard from Lisbon within the next two weeks, the matter would be considered closed.
The following night, at the vacant house he had already scouted in a quiet quarter near Sèvres (the same house whose address he had dropped to Farinha), he calmly took the lives of the two thugs sent to take his. Foolishly, Farinha was waiting in a car nearby. They drove to the Forêt de Meudon. Farinha pleaded for mercy, a second chance, but Borodin finished the business and torched the body in the car.
It was a job well done, and he had hoped for more in the way of gratitude from the Karamans. Instead, they had dispatched Petrovic to Paris to fill Malovic’s shoes. Borodin knew better than to grumble. To the brothers, dissent was tantamount to treason. He could name several men within the organization who had failed to grasp this fact, and he had no plans to follow them to hell before his time. He quietly accepted his lot: that of an old warhorse put out to pasture but still expected to pull its weight from time to time. He did unquestioningly whatever was asked of him. He stole or hijacked a truck; he leaned on those who owed them money; and as the operation expanded under Petrovic’s ambitious program, he scouted new warehouses around the country, hiring fresh personnel in the process.
He had heard it said that every man had two countries: his own and France. And he’d learned the truth of this through travel—getting to know the various cities and their histories, the regional cuisines and wines, and the many peoples united in their simple love of living properly. He lingered as long as he could whenever he was away from Paris, and he threw himself into the language, turning to books, to literature, for the first time in his life and working away at his accent until he almost began to think of himself as his alter ego, Bernard Fautrier.
With Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, the German front offered new opportunities. Tyranny was always good for business, for it walked hand in hand with fear and flight. A drunken evening with a Jewish lawyer in a bar in Metz had led him to Johan and Pippi. They burned with a youthful zeal that he mistrusted by instinct, but he was taken with Pippi from the first. She lacked Johan’s intensity; she didn’t bristle with the same fierce indignation at the injustices being perpetrated by the Nazis. Or if she did, she also knew that he, Borodin, was not moved by such concerns and that Johan’s impassioned tirades washed right over him.
He thought about Pippi now, privileged and damaged and looking to patch up old wounds of her own, and reminded himself why he had released Hamilton into her charge. Given the debacle with the paintings that had resulted in Johan’s death, it was the last place the Karamans would think of looking for him. It was also Borodin’s way of letting Pippi know that he was not to blame for the unfortunate events of that night, and that the danger lay in her own backyard. Had she been smart enough to work this out, or had he overestimated her? Worryingly, both she and Hamilton had disappeared off the map in Konstanz.
Whup … whup … whup went the ceiling fan, and a hand alighted on his stomach as gently as a falling leaf.
“Do you want to do it again?” came her drowsy voice from beside him.
“At my age?”
He sensed her smiling. “You might surprise yourself.”
They had met in the bar downstairs. Every whore had a sob story up her sleeve, but as someone who had spent much of his life fabricating tales about himself, he had sensed a sizable grain of truth in hers. She was Italian, lured to Paris by the false promises of a Frenchman she had met in her native Naples.
“How much will it cost me?” he asked.
“How much do you have?”
“Three hundred thousand francs.”
She laughed. She wasn’t to know that the cash was hidden beneath a loose floorb
oard near the washstand in the corner.
“Breakfast will do,” she said.
It hadn’t been his intention to bring her to his bed, but little about the evening had gone to plan. He had at least set out to do the sensible thing. He knew that Petrovic would have put the word out, hoping for a chance sighting of him or a snatch of gossip. It was the reason he had installed himself in the Nineteenth Arrondissement, an area of the city he had almost no association with. It was also the reason he had bought a ticket for the film showing at the small picture house around the corner from his hotel.
He had lasted about half an hour, not that the film was to blame. He would happily have spent more time in the company of Pépel, Jean Gabin’s quick-witted thief caught between his greed and his good intentions. But a sudden reckless impulse had driven him to his feet. Did he really wish to cower in the darkness like a terrified animal when the city was out there waiting to be savored one last time?
He had roamed the streets, his senses alert, absorbing the impressions and filing them away for future reflection: a shower of sparks from the overhead cable of an electric tram clattering along Avenue Jean-Jaurès, the passengers boxed and lit like specimens on display … the faint but unmistakable odor of the slaughterhouses up the road at La Villette … an old clochard dancing in laceless boots for loose change by the Métro station on Place du Rhin … the toytown houses of Mouzaïa, a poor quarter where the men wore caps rather than hats … the languid strains of jazz manouche wafting up from a basement club, when not so long ago the gypsy musicians were to be found only on street corners … the Parc des Buttes Chaumont, somber and silent, a dark island in the city it brooded over from its hillside perch, the gypsum quarries of old now a fairy-tale kingdom of cliffs and rocky outcrops and shrouded pathways that wound past waterfalls and alpine grottoes.
He had made a loop through the park, the stars lighting his way, the moon a mere fingernail cutting. He had taken the high suspension bridge to the island in the middle of the lake: a soaring, craggy mass, like a mountain peak that had been lopped off and transported to the city. Its bluffs plunged vertically down to the inky waters, and it was crowned by a Grecian temple that offered a sweeping view across Paris, all the way to the Sacré-Coeur, lit up and blazing, wedding-cake white atop Montmartre. He had stopped to smoke a cigarette in the temple, then gone in search of a brasserie to serve him his last supper.
Strangely, it hadn’t struck him at the time, but it did now: the vertiginous landscape of the park rang a note of home, his first home, Vrlika, with its cliff and its ruined castle looming over it. He pictured the damp, cramped farmhouse where he had grown up, when things were still good, before the crops failed several years running and his father turned to drink. The youngest of three brothers, he bore the brunt of the beatings, soon learning that to cry out only fueled his father’s rage. And when he finally judged himself strong enough to retaliate, he waited a while longer, just to be sure.
The canvas knapsack he used for school was already packed when his father stumbled home from the bar that Saturday night. The boy knew what was coming, and the moment it began, he struck back with a sudden wild fury that surprised even him. His brothers were away, searching for work in Zadar, and he might well have finished the job if his mother hadn’t intervened, crying and begging him to stop. He didn’t say goodbye to her. He looked into the wet, red eyes of the woman who had never once raised a hand to protect him, and headed out into the night.
He recalled with shame some of the things he had done while on the move in those early years: the thieving from men who had offered him shelter and work and placed their trust in him; the girls he had loved and then left without so much as a farewell. No binding ties for him, the wanderer, the drifter, the man of the road. When he finally settled in Ragusa, it was for the anonymity that a big city offered, although the rich pickings to be had down at the docks were what had held him there for almost a decade. Real money in his pocket at last, and then a young wife and a small child—a daughter, Simona. It should have been enough, but Edvina’s endless badgering about earning an honest wage for once had worn him down and brought on the old itch.
Young and new to the smuggling game, he’d had only cursory dealings with the Karaman brothers, so the invitation to go and work for them in Spalato had taken him by surprise. He leaped at the offer, driving his marriage into the ground before walking out for good. He already knew that the Karamans were ambitious (and ruthless when necessary), but it soon became clear that they were also smart. They understood the power of politics and political protection, and in the years before the Great War, the sands were shifting, presenting new opportunities to those prepared to seize them.
The coastal province of Dalmatia had always been a divided society. Tensions between the wealthy Italian minority and the largely uneducated Croat majority had been simmering away for as long as anyone alive could remember. Now, though, the Habsburg masters back in Vienna were turning up the heat with their policy of systematically disempowering the Italians. The last thing they wanted for the empire was an influential elite in a far-flung province dreaming of their homeland and a possible reannexation.
Italian schools were closed down, legislation was introduced to limit the use of Italian as an official language, and votes were rigged to keep Italians from political office. One of Borodin’s first jobs for the Karamans was registering the dead in order to swing elections.
Before long, the tensions in Spalato boiled over into violence, much of it orchestrated by the Karamans, who were looking to cement their role as the unofficial muscle of the new hardliners. Italian businesses were targeted, their windows broken. Insults were freely and publicly hurled, and whenever things came to blows, the police invariably sided with their own kind, arresting any Italians who dared to stand up for themselves. Toward the end of Borodin’s first summer in Spalato, two Italian longshoremen were assaulted by a group of Croats as they left a bar down at the port. Being dockworkers, they knew how to handle themselves in a fight, and they were still standing when reinforcements arrived in the form of their colleagues working the night shift at Albrizzi Marittima. The brawl quickly escalated into a pitched battle, which the police struggled to break up. Once they had, though, they knew better than to try taking a bunch of burly dockers into custody. Besides, Albrizzi was a name to be reckoned with.
The Karamans were less respectful. Sensing an opportunity, they decided to put the Albrizzis’ authority to the test. The next evening, they gathered together a gang of young Croats and set off across town. A mob on the move was a dangerous monster. Numbers quickly swelled, and feelings were running high by the time they reached the Albrizzis’ residence.
Borodin closed his eyes and summoned up the memory of that night, whose true significance was only now clear to him. He saw the large house set some distance back from the street, the iron gates chained and padlocked in anticipation of trouble. As the mob grew more vocal, Vittorio Albrizzi appeared from the house. A few members of his family joined him on the front steps, but when he set off down the driveway to confront the crowd, he was on his own. Arriving at the gates, he stood and waited calmly for the shower of abuse to abate. When it finally did, he opened with a joke.
“It is my father’s birthday today. As some of you know, his mind is going. He thinks you have come to celebrate it with him.”
Encouraged by the sound of laughter, Albrizzi’s wife came to join him, slipping her arm through her husband’s as he made a heartfelt plea for peace and unity. Were they not Dalmatians, all of them, first and foremost? And had not Dalamtia been in existence far longer than the empire that currently held sway over it—the same empire that sought to rule them by dividing them? They owed it to each other to overcome the dangerous passions being aroused in them by forces from afar. Dalmatia would still be here long after the Austro-Hungarians had left. Albrizzi proposed that all grievances be placed on hold for the night. Tomorrow they wou
ld meet again, at a place of their choosing, and talk things through in a cool-headed manner. He pledged to pay all medical bills and cover all loss of earnings resulting from injuries sustained in the fracas last night, for Croat and Italian alike.
He had us, thought Borodin. And then someone threw the rock.
How many lives had been reshaped by that one rock? Hamilton’s, for sure, even though, in the summer of 1909, he had yet to be born. Borodin’s own? Undoubtedly. He wouldn’t be lying here now next to an Italian prostitute in this grimy little room. How many other lives? Hundreds? More? He pictured the effects multiplying, proliferating, like the boughs, branches, and twigs of a towering oak tree. And not forgetting the roots quietly spreading beneath the soil—the unseen and unknown consequences. All because of a single, tiny acorn.
That was the way of it, though. The best-laid plans could carry you only so far. One’s destiny turned on the smallest things.
“One rock,” he muttered.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
She was lying on her side, facing the wall, and he noticed for the first time the bruises on her back. Breakfast will do. The poor creature, fearful of returning home to her husband, evidently wanted a bed for the night. She had told Borodin earlier that all she hoped for was to earn enough money to buy a ticket back to Naples.
“What’s your real name?”
She didn’t reply immediately. “Rosaria.”
He reached past her and turned off the bedside light.
“Do you want to do it again?” she said once more.
He planted a light kiss on her cheek and lay back in the darkness. “No. Sleep, Rosaria, and dream of breakfast. We’ll go somewhere special.”
And maybe over breakfast he would squeeze her a little to see if her story stood up. And if it did, well, maybe he would surprise her. Then again, his sentimental mood might well have dissipated by then, like a low-lying mist burned off by the heat of the new day.