Columbus (12 page)

She must’ve gone home and chosen a black suit to wear. Conservative, but feminine. A suit conveying that her occupation dealt on the intersection where business and creativity collide.

She must have then walked to the hotel, pleased her anonymous caller chose a place just a few blocks from her home. She had her financial ledger tucked in tight at her elbow, a check and a pen ready if the seller needed to make this deal happen immediately.

She had no idea a man was watching her from the moment she left her apartment. She had no idea the man was scouring the area like a hawk, looking for any hint of abnormality, any hint of a pursuer, any threat to himself. She had no idea that the man was heavily armed, that the man was a professional, that the man was dangerous.

She probably sat in the lobby of the St. George Hotel, growing anxious and annoyed with each passing minute. She probably wondered if she was the victim of a hoax or if Alda was losing her mind. At some point, she wandered into the library, just off the lobby.

Her beauty was electric, powerful. It drew eyes to her like a beacon cutting through fog. She was the opposite of the man. It almost hurt him to approach her.

“Hello, Risina.”

She turns and her smile is broad and warm.

“Jack!”

“You’re not going to be too upset if it’s just me instead of Lewis and Clark?”

She crosses to me instantly and embraces me with her whole body. I can’t remember the last time I held someone in my arms like that, without reservation.

“You are a bad man.”

“I’ve told myself that many times.”

“You could have just called me and told me you were in town.”

“What would’ve been the fun in that?”

She hits me playfully and pulls back, smiling. Goddamn, she is beautiful.

“Did you get a room here?”

“Yes, but that’s not what I—”

“Take me to it.”

An hour later, we lie exposed on the sheets, her head on my chest, her fingers intertwined with mine.

“I can honestly say I thought about you each day you were gone.” Her voice is low in her throat, like a cat’s purr.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t get back here sooner.”

“How was business?”

“Ongoing.”

Her lips form a moue. “Does that mean you’ll be leaving soon?”

“Yes.”

“This is how it’s going to be, isn’t it?”

“Just for now.”

“Don’t tell lies for my sake.”

“I’m not. I’ve been thinking quite a bit about changing jobs.”

“Oh?”

I stroke her hair, tracing her eyebrows with my thumb.

“Yes, finding something where I wouldn’t have to move around so much.”

“And you would settle in Rome?”

“Would you like that?”

“I like you, Jack. Very much. There is something inside me that tenses every time I see you. I don’t know how to describe it, but it happens. It is something I look forward to . . . this feeling . . . and not knowing when I’m going to experience it again has been . . . difficult for me.”

She takes her hand out of mine and sits up on her elbow so she can look at me. “I’m sorry. I’m not expressing myself well. The way I mean to.”

“You’re very pretty.”

She frowns. If I can change the subject abruptly, so can she. “Tell me about your scars.”

She looks down when she says this, like she’s afraid of my response.

I knew it was coming . . . her fingers had traced my wounds earlier, and I winced once when we shifted places. But I’m not sure, even now, I’m not sure I’m ready to let her in. Once that door swings open, it is impossible to close.

She senses my hesitation and lies back down, resuming her position with her head on my chest. For a minute, I think she isn’t going to speak again, that she may fall asleep right there. But I am wrong.

“A man paid for my education. In America.”

I know she has more to say, so I wait.

“I was seventeen and worked in a small grocery store on the other side of Rome, near Vatican City. I worked there from the time I was thirteen, making a few lira after school so I could help my parents. The man who owned the store . . . his name was Giuseppe Rono. My parents and others in the neighborhood didn’t like him, didn’t trust him. He had moved into the neighborhood from a farming village near Siena. He was unmarried and had an ugly face.

“He would come to the gymnasium at the school and watch the girls play soccer, even though he had no daughter on the team. There were whispers—I heard them from my friend’s parents, from neighbors—of how his eyes would linger too long on the girls running and jumping and playing. It was a time when people didn’t talk about such things, and still, there was talk. My parents wanted me to quit working in his shop, but I refused. I was a strong-willed girl, and I was at an age when I would choose to do whatever my parents forbid. As the weeks progressed, Giuseppe Rono and I became friendly. I would stay after work to talk to him about the latest gossip from school and he would listen to it all, passing on advice and taking an interest in all my activities, always ready to lend his ear.

“One afternoon, he called me into the small office he owned behind the store. He was seated behind a wooden desk, and his hand was down in his lap where I couldn’t see it. His arm was moving slightly, and I could see he was sweating, even though it was cool that day. His face was smiling, but it was . . . I don’t know how you say it in English . . . ?”

“Lopsided?”

“Yes, that’s it. A lopsided smile. I remember thinking I was a fool, I had failed to heed everyone’s warnings and they were right about Giuseppi Rono. I cursed him, though the words wouldn’t come out. I hated him, though my face couldn’t move. If I’d had a gun in my hand, I would’ve shot him right there. I know it.

“He wanted to show me something, he told me. I was paralyzed . . . I knew I should turn and run away but my legs wouldn’t work, I couldn’t make them work.”

She takes a breath, gathering herself.

“Goddamn him, I thought. Damn him for betraying me like this. He started to stand up and I wanted to tear my eyes away but I couldn’t avert them. I couldn’t move, no matter how much my mind screamed at me to go, just go! Run away from that place screaming. . . .

“I looked down at his lap, and in his hands, he was holding a sheet of paper, folding it and refolding it nervously. ‘Risina,’ he told me, his face expectant, hopeful. ‘Risina, I had a wife and child who died many years ago in an auto crash in Siena. My daughter, her name was Christiana, she would have been your age.’ His voice was shaking, and he continued to turn that paper over and over. ‘I have contacted the University in America, the one you told me you could not afford. I have set up an account for you, Risina. To pay for your schooling. It was money set aside for Christiana, but you have been the daughter she was to me. You must accept this, Risina. You must let me do this for you while I can. It would mean everything to a brokenhearted and lonely man.’

“I don’t remember what happened after that . . . I remember hugging him so hard I thought he might break. I remember my parents coming into the office . . . he had already contacted them and explained his situation. They were ashamed, but proud. Proud of me and my chance for an education. I remember my father’s hand pumping Mr. Rono’s, and I remember the smile on Rono’s face so large I thought it would light up the sun. And all I could think about as I hugged him, all I could think about was that I had rushed to hate him just ten minutes before. That I would have shot him with a gun if I’d had the chance. That I had cursed him.

“He died of cancer the month after I graduated. He was too sick to attend the ceremony, but he wrote me a letter which I carry with me always.”

Her voice stops but the story remains between us like a tangible object.

I run my hand through her hair again, splay it out against my chest, unsure what to say. After a moment, she takes my fingers back in hers.

“I’ve learned there can be a great distance between perception and the truth. And I know there are things about you you wish to keep a mystery from me. Just know that I won’t rush to judge you, Jack. The one thing I will never do is judge you.”

The shower is therapeutic, and the pain in my side from the bullet wound has diminished to nothing more than a twinge. I feel better than I’ve felt in a long time, for as long as I can remember, actually.

I can see it now, like a map unfolded in front of me. There is an end to this, to this life. I can shed it like a snake’s skin. Throughout adulthood, I’ve felt like this job defined me, was a part of me, was inside me. But I see it now, I can
see
it, goddammit, maybe for the first time.

I haven’t left it, haven’t escaped it, because I didn’t
want
to leave this way of life. I never cared about the money; it was the challenge and the skill and the craft and the power I devoured like an addict. And after years of doing the job, of sharpening my abilities, of mastering my prowess, of forgetting Jake, the only woman who knew me as something other than a killer, I’d lost any measure of what my life could be without it.

But Risina changes that. Is she an ideal? Is my desperation for human contact coloring how I view the woman asleep in the bed outside this bathroom? Am I purposely turning a blind eye to her faults, creating in my mind a Madonna void of blemishes, when the truth must fall far short?

The answer is: I don’t give a damn.

I am out of the shower, dried and dressed, tying my shoes when she stirs.

“You are leaving?”

“Yes. Take your time. Order breakfast to the room.”

She sits up, unselfconsciously. I can’t help but look at her, drinking her in. Like her laughter before, it is an image I know will sustain me over the next few weeks, as I finish this and free myself.

“Do you think you will be long this time?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. But I don’t know.”

“Is there danger you will not come back at all?”

“Why do you ask?”

“I know what those scars are, Jack. There’s a bullet wound in your side. Old bullet wounds in your shoulder and on your chest. I can only imagine what made the other marks.”

She says it matter-of-factly, with no malice in her eyes.

“I will be back. I promise.”

“I believe you.”

“I will tell you everything when I return.”

“I believe that too.”

I head for the door and reach for the handle.

“Jack. . . . ”

“Yes?”

“Be sure and bring that first edition Lewis and Clark with you when you come back to me.”

She is grinning and her eyes are merry.

“I will.”

I pull the door behind me and walk away from the room, down the corridor, alone. My smile disappears by the time I reach the street.

CHAPTER TEN

ALEXANDER COULFRET IS GOING TO BE A DIFFICULT MAN TO KILL.

Without a fence, a middleman, to put a file together, I am learning the craft on my own. I have a new respect for the job Vespucci, Pooley, and Ryan did, the job Grant and Doriot still do. I suppose I could have phoned Archibald Grant in Chicago and seen what blanks he could fill in regarding Coulfret, but I just don’t want that particular string tied any tighter. I already owe the man enough.

When I’ve needed information in the past, I’ve either stolen it from the shadows, or I’ve compelled someone to give it to me against his or her will. In those instances, the information I seek is specific—the location of a particular mark on that given day, say—and I don’t have to worry about returning to the source again.

But compiling a background file on a man, a large dossier so I have myriad choices of how and where and when to strike, requires a much different approach.

I start in the offices of
Le Monde
, posing as an American film writer. My former fence Pooley once explained people will do anything to help you if they think there is an outside chance of being immortalized. People from all walks of life—waitresses to senators—would open up to him and spill their secrets as he appealed to their vanity, claiming to be a screenwriter, a reporter, a novelist, a film producer. I intimate I am researching a script centering on Parisian crime, a
French Connection
for the new millennium, and I need background information on a man named Alexander Coulfret.

A public relations woman escorts me to their catalog room, where every article, every scrap of paper, including reporter’s notes in some instances, has been added to an enormous database. The woman, BeBe, is genial and coquettish. She sets me up in a cubicle, asks if I need anything to drink, hands me her card, and then leaves me alone with the computer.

Hours later, I emerge from the building with the following information.

A young man named Alex Coulfret was arrested twice in the nineties, once for robbery and once for stabbing a man with a knife, though the victim made a full recovery. Both articles mention jail time, but there is no followup reporting to indicate whether or not Alex was found guilty or whether he served. Both arrests occurred on the east side of the city, in the Eleventh arrondissement, near the Bastille. Information about the perpetrator is scant, a “white male in his twenties” the full extent of the description.

Only one other occurrence of the name appears in the newspaper, a mention in the bottom of that article from 2003, the one I found when I first punched the name Alexander Coulfret into Google back in Archibald’s apartment. I barely glanced at it before, but now I study the details a bit more closely. A train leaving Paris crashed into a stranded bus just outside the city, killing twelve people. Listed alphabetically among the dead: Alex Coulfret. The article is maddeningly short—no other details emerge about the victims—like it was written just before the evening deadline. I check the next day’s edition and find no mention of the crash; the story was swept away by the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya.

These buried facts are tiny seeds, just specks of information, but they start to grow into a portrait of the man who paid the contract on my life. First, I’m guessing he was born in or near the Bastille district; the connection between the two arrests indicates proximity, familiarity. Second, the types of offenses certainly keep in line with a low-level member of a criminal organization. Not every arrest makes the paper. I wonder how many more crimes Alex committed or was arrested for in his early adulthood. Third, a man who has the resources to hire a trio of professional killers also has the resources to fake his own death, to land his name on a list of the deceased following a fatal public accident. The short time—ten years between
Le Monde
mentions—gives me pause.