by Alex Dryden
At first, French security personnel had taken a house in the village too, while her safety was established. The villagers said nothing—they rarely commented outside their homes on the affairs of others. But she was aware that they connected her arrival with the two men and a woman from Paris. Her three guardians were unmistakably police or security officers. The mayor, at least, would have been told of the reason for their presence, and he was a drinker and a gossip.
Anna might now have a French name, and she spoke the language well, but she was clearly a foreigner, and to the villagers, she was someone special.
She felt lighthearted this morning, as she had done, she suddenly realised, for weeks now. The weight of the past was beginning to lift, and her grief at Finn’s death was more of a numbing sensation than the all-consuming pain it had once been. She felt free to expand again—in herself and from this place of safety—more free than she had felt for a long while.
When her French guardians had finally packed up and gone, assuring her that she and the boy were now safe, they had left her with emergency numbers. Then someone from the DGSE in Paris would come to visit once a month. There was always competition for the job, for a trip to the south certainly, but mainly to spend time in her company. She was highly regarded for her expertise and experience in matters of espionage, but she was also admired by her French handlers for her cool beauty and her bravery.
Her controllers in Paris—and now she herself—believed that the secret of her identity and location was solid, and for her the monthly meeting had developed into a formality that became an irksome reminder that all was not right and never would be.
It was true, there had been one or two bad moments, like the incident at the village fete the summer before, just after they’d arrived. It was the only time of year when the village filled up with outsiders. A fairground had been set up in the square, and much was drunk late into the night. There was dancing, and two men had approached her, first flirtatiously, then aggressively, finally insisting she dance with them. But they were drunk, and when they ignored her refusals and began to manhandle her, she had instinctively laid them out on the grass, one with a blow to the side of the head, the other with a broken arm and leg.
The villagers had looked at her with new eyes after that. She became respected, but also an object of greater suspicion. She had made a few friends that night, but others wondered, Who was this foreign woman who could overcome two men and knock them cold? It was also noted that the police who arrived to arrest the men were overrespectful towards her.
But in general it had been an increasingly peaceful year. She felt stronger and more ready to take whatever steps life held in store for her now. She was beginning to understand that, in order to control her life, she needed to stop trying to control it, as she always had.
Her life was small, with the days centred around her son. She had named him Finn, Little Finn, as she and Willy referred to him. The villagers noted that she spent a great deal of time with him, that she never had visitors, except for the older man she called Willy, and that she was as independent and capable of fending for herself as anyone. A quiet admiration for her grew in the village. She never asked anyone for anything, never intruded into their lives, and slowly, her quiet, dignified calm drew the people of Fougieres out of their natural reticence with strangers to the extent that they greeted her and Little Finn in the street. She hadn’t been invited inside their homes, but as another exile like herself—the gay owner of the village’s bed and breakfast—had told her, it took at least a quarter of a century to become a local here.
She and Little Finn continued on their way, past the wrought iron fence and down the lane.
The French children were not yet back at the village school at the end of August, but the crèche was hardly a school and stayed open irregularly. Today it was open, however, and its rules were negligible. It didn’t matter how late they were, or if Little Finn went at all. But today Anna was going to meet Willy for lunch on her birthday. Willy had been her only regular contact in the two years since Finn’s death, apart from the sporadic meetings with the officers from French security. But today she needed to speak to him alone, with her head clear of her son’s needs.
Anna and Little Finn walked on, past the head-high shutters of the old, huddled homes, closed as usual against the heat, but more, she believed, against prying eyes, and so that those inside could pry without being seen. These rural French were private, she thought, almost like the Sicilians; friendly enough in a monosyllabic sort of way when you encountered them, but unforthcoming, at any rate to anyone outside their own history.
The village was empty as usual. It was only ever full during the fetes, or when the grapes were being brought in, which would be soon. There were few visitors except for the occasional car full of tourists who had taken a blind diversion to see something they would otherwise have missed on the main roads. There was also the infrequent visitor to the gay bed and breakfast establishment at the manor house, where Jonny, the other exile, and his French boyfriend ran an Internet-only lodging. The two of them had become as close friends as she had anywhere. Everything—life, family, work, and friends—was either dead or left behind in Russia.
She recalled that in the years leading up to her defection, her chief worry had been that Finn would leave her as soon as she committed herself to coming over. It had never occurred to her that he would die. That wasn’t something people in life-threatening occupations gave much thought to.
They stopped outside the bed and breakfast, and she saw Jonny and his boyfriend dipping in and out of the pool. “Come and have a glass of wine,” Jonny shouted when he spotted her.
“It’s eleven o’clock in the morning,” she retorted, laughing.
“Exactly,” he said.
She smiled without replying. They were unlikely friends, she thought, but she trusted them after a year. They were outsiders in the village like her, and with a cosmopolitan flair. It was the only house other than her own that she had entered in the village. They accepted her and Little Finn without asking questions.
“No visitors this week?” she called. It was a routine question.
“Two Danish lesbians just booked in for tonight.” Jonny relished shouting the information across the village square.
She and Little Finn walked on.
It was a good place to be hidden, she thought. It was a good place, end of story. But most importantly, anyone new—and any strange car—would be noted down by someone. She felt the safety of being watched by the eyes of the village. And little from outside disturbed the slow torpor, apart from the library van on a Thursday and the baker’s van on a Friday.
Even the hunters who visited in the winter months and surrounded the village on misty mornings all came from the surrounding villages, and she’d learned to identify them all in their first winter. They met at 5:00 a.m. in the “bar,” a room owned by the mayor that was a bar only in name. Then they dispersed into the fog after a few coupes de vin, before it was light, and returned late in the afternoon, often with the carcass of a boar, which was butchered in the village and shared out. And then the bar was full until they all drove home with varying degrees of recklessness across the fields.
Anna and Little Finn reached the mairie, which was where the crèche had its home. She led him inside under the drooping tricolour at the entrance to find a room full of children on the floor, drawing, talking, shouting. The two women who ran the crèche were from the city, Marseille, and they were happier than the children to be living in this rural paradise.
“Madame Paulin,” she was greeted by the younger of the two teachers. “Bonjour, Charlot.” She smiled at Finn.
Finn didn’t yet know there were two languages, only that he spoke different words for the same things at home and at school; and that sometimes his mother called him Charlot and sometimes Finn. He didn’t seem to mind.
“A quinze heures, c’est bon?” the teacher said to Anna.
“Oui.
Et merci.” Three o’clock would be fine. She’d be back long before then.
“De rien,” the teacher said, and smiled. “Bonne journée.”
Anna let go of the boy’s hand. He didn’t look back, safe in the company of the women and his friends.
She returned to the house around the path through the fields. M. Barry was cranking the portable sawmill on the other side of the street from her house. There was a pile of tree limbs and bits of broken fencing, ready to be cut.
She’d learned that M. Barry, like the others, prepared long in advance for the winter. It was cold up here, not like in Russia, but a damp, chilling cold that entered the bones.
She wished him good morning, and he raised his cap; same clothes, same cap, summer and winter. He was a handsome man in his sixties, with a wife who suffered from Parkinson’s disease. He’d told Anna once that he had never been beyond Uzès, seven miles away, in his entire life. In a year, she had come to enjoy her fleeting conversations with him out by the sawmill, conversations that went beyond the natural reserve of the other villagers. He had quietly assumed a paternalistic role of looking out for her.
“You need anything?” he enquired. “I’ll have some wood soon, but anything else?”
“I don’t think so. Thank you for asking.”
He was kind to her and her son. He gave them homemade cheese sometimes, or sausage he made himself from one of the wild boars shot in winter.
“It’s hot now, but soon it will be autumn,” he said, as if to explain the woodpile. But she thought he looked awkward, more so than usual.
He paused, raised his cap, and scratched his head. He seemed to be thinking of what to say, not like his normal, relaxed manner at all.
“You are not too lonely?” he suddenly asked.
This was out of character—too intimate, she felt. But there was something about his face that told her he was serious.
“No, not lonely,” she replied and smiled.
“Never any visitors,” he remarked, again pricking her into wariness. It was not the type of conversation they had. There was never anything personal. Not like this at all. But equally she felt drawn to reply honestly, without fear.
“No. Never any visitors,” she replied. “Apart from Willy.”
Willy and M. Barry had struck up a joint friendship, in the unspoken cause of her protection.
M. Barry paused and lifted his cap again and wiped the sweat from his head with the back of the same hand. Then he took out a tobacco pouch and began to roll a cigarette. As he did so, he spoke, as if he needed something to do in order to say what he was going to say.
“Not the man on Saturday, then,” he said.
She immediately froze. “Saturday?”
“He came to your gates. No farther. I thought you must be out walking.”
“Did he ring the bell, then?
“No. No, he didn’t.”
He put the cigarette in his mouth, lit it, and picked up the crank handle for the sawmill.
She was silent, her mind racing through the events of Saturday, looking for something out of the ordinary.
“What did he look like?” she asked.
“He was slim, about your age I should think. White jacket. I didn’t see him close to. He looked like an athlete, perhaps.”
“A car? Did he have a car?”
“Not that I saw.”
“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you, Monsieur Barry. I appreciate it.”
He tipped his cap and gave her a broad, confident smile.
“I’ll have plenty of wood for you when winter comes, don’t you worry,” he said, and began to crank the handle again.
She walked around to the side of the house. She had the numbers to call in an emergency, but what could she say?
A man had come to the house. White jacket.
She paused and seemed to remember a man in Uzès on Saturday. He wore a white jacket, she remembered. It was certainly enough of a reason to call Paris, but she was reluctant. She didn’t want to shatter the illusion she’d enjoyed moments before that her life had become safe. She decided to mention it to Willy first.
On entering the house, she took a gun from the locked drawer in the kitchen. It was a Thompson Contender pistol, a handgun that was unique for its range. With just a twelve-inch barrel, it could hit a target at over two hundred yards if you were good enough. And she was good enough. She realised she hadn’t taken it out of the drawer for over a month.
She put her cell phone in the pocket of a jacket and took the car keys from the table by the door. She looked around finally, expecting to see something out of the ordinary, but the old farmhouse seemed calm. It had been built in the year of the French Revolution. There was a stone engraved with the date by the front gate. Maybe down here, in the small places, even great events like revolutions went unnoticed.
Locking the door behind her, she opened the big metal gates and drove the Mercedes out. She placed the gun under the driver’s seat. Then she closed the gates behind her.
There was a pile of sand by the wall of the next house, left there after some building job had been completed. She was suddenly alert, her trained instincts activated. She stepped out of the car and sprinkled a little sand around the gates, not so much as would be noticed, but enough if you were looking for the faintest sign of a footprint later.
Chapter 8
LARS SHADED HIS EYES against the high sun. Then he cast his gaze down again towards the monastery. It was tucked away in a grove of cypresses and pines, across an isthmus on a flat, man-made island out in the bay. Flipping the pages of a tourist guide, he pretended to study what he already knew. The monastery had been built in the eleventh century as a sanctuary for Orthodox Christians fleeing the Turkish invasion of Serbia. Inside its weathered, arched dark wood gates was a courtyard of rough flagstones in the cypress shade, and then a tiny church dedicated to Saint Sava of Serbia.
A few yards beyond the little white church was the monastery, built a few centuries later.
He looked up from the guidebook. It had been a month since his first visit, and he knew the layout from memory. The key element for his second visit was the tall bell tower that protruded above the monastery on the side of the island facing the open sea. Once again, he studied the height and position of the tower carefully. The tower had once doubled as a lighthouse for sailors from Venetian trading fleets, Levantine merchant vessels, Arab dhows, and Turkish gulets, sent out to engage the West in commerce, when there was no war, from the Port of the Sultan. It had been built for the view.
Lars waited in the hot sun at the edge of the group of tourists.
There was an American couple, the woman with frizzy hair and a pinched, nervous face, the man taller by a head, with a flabby grin. He looked bulky in huge shorts and an open shirt. The others were local, Montenegrins or citizens from the surrounding Balkan countries; an old woman dressed in black; a young couple who couldn’t stop touching each other; two women who might have been academics—they looked like they’d be at home in a library, he thought—and an old man with grizzled white stubble and intensely green eyes. He supported himself on a gnarled stick.
Finally the shabby tourist bus was almost full, and Lars stepped inside last of all, paying the return fare for the monastery visit. He placed his backpack carefully on the rack. It was heavier than last time, and he didn’t want the canister inside it clanking against the metal of the rack.
The bus set off almost at once across the rock isthmus that, according to the guidebook, was built as a later addition to the monastery, when convenience overcame isolated seclusion on the monks’ wish list.
He studied the tourists on the bus again. He needed to be sure that, unlike him, they were what they seemed. Most were apparently day trippers from the capital city, Podgorica, while others had come from abroad and wore backpacks, shorts, sandals, and caps against the intense heat. One or two of the older local people also wore an Orthodox cross around their necks.
He sat
next to the old lady in black and nodded a greeting. She crossed herself, and he returned her pious gesture. He was praying too, in his way, but not for something that she would understand.
The bus crossed noisily between the perfectly calm stretches of turquoise water on either side of the isthmus, belching exhaust fumes into the clear air.
They disembarked on the far side, in the shade of the massive cypress tree. A few scrawny chickens pecked at the bare grass and the scraps of potato chips and snacks previous visitors had dropped. The air was still, dead. The tree above him could have been painted against the sky. The dark green, almost black cypress stood like a shadow against the shattering blue.
Lars took a drink from a plastic water bottle and waited for the others to shuffle towards the monastery in that soporific, almost dutiful way adopted by visitors to sacred places. He didn’t follow them on the unguided tour but looked around, from time to time checking carefully where they’d stopped. Their first pause was at the tiny chapel to pay a preliminary homage to Saint Sava, and then on to the main attraction, the monastery itself.
He set off at an angle, away from them. Before he entered the monastery, he wanted to take a walk around the small island. He felt exposed here, at the end of the isthmus on a small outcrop of piled rocks. There was only one way out. He’d told them he wouldn’t do the job if there was only one exit, and they’d had to make a complicated plan so that he could extricate himself if things went wrong.
He hoisted the backpack over his shoulders. It was heavy. It was not just the rifle this time, but a small air tank with five litres in it that would, he hoped, get him out of danger if that proved necessary. He’d almost decided to use it anyway.
He stood on the shore facing north first of all, balancing himself on a huge stone that was part of the breakwater of tumbled rocks scattered all around the island. Straight ahead of him, the coast curled round to the right, five miles away, before reaching another high cliff promontory where it presumably curved back northwards again.