I Am Pilgrim (8 page)

would wink at me and say, ‘She’s right – whatever it is, you can’t call it art. I call it charity – some people give to the United Way, I support starving artists.’

But beneath all the jokes, he knew what he was doing. Years later, I realized what an expert eye he

had, which was strange, given that he was completely untrained and his family’s only interest had been chemicals. His mother ’s name before she married had been DuPont.

The second week we were in Paris, Bill got a call from a guy in Strasbourg who said he had a sheaf

of drawings by Robert Rauschenberg dating from when the great Pop artist was an unknown marine.

The next day, Bill and I got on a plane with a bag packed for the weekend, leaving Grace to indulge

her second great passion – shopping at Hermès.

And so it was, once Bill had bought the drawings, that we found ourselves in Strasbourg on a Sunday with nothing to do. ‘I thought we might go out to the Vosges mountains,’ he said. ‘Grace’d probably say you’re too young, but there’s a place you should see – sometimes life can seem difficult, and it’s important to keep things in perspective.’

Bill knew about Natzweiler-Struthof because of his father – he’d been a lieutenant colonel in the US

Sixth Army that had campaigned across Europe. The colonel had arrived at the camp just after the SS

abandoned it, and he was given the job of writing a report that found its way to the War Crimes Tribunal in Nuremburg.

I don’t know if Bill had ever read his father ’s document, but he found the twisting road without any trouble and we pulled into the car park just before noon, a brilliant summer ’s day. Slowly we walked into death’s house.

The camp had been preserved as a French historic site because so many members of the Resistance

had died there. Bill pointed out the old hotel outbuilding the Germans had converted into a gas chamber, and a crematorium packed with body-elevators and ovens.

For one of the few times in my life, I held his hand.

We passed the gallows used for public executions, the building where they had conducted medical experiments, and came to Prisoner Barracks Number One, which housed a museum. Inside – among

the prisoners’ old uniforms and diagrams of the concentration-camp system – we got separated.

In a quiet corner at the back, near a row of bunk beds where the surrounding ghosts seemed even

more tangible, I found a photo displayed on a wall. Actually, there were a lot of photos of the Holocaust, but this was the one that has never left me. It was in black and white and it showed a short, stocky woman walking down a wide path between towering electrified fences. By the look of the light

it was late in the afternoon, and in the language of those times she was dressed like a peasant.

By chance there were no guards, no dogs, no watchtowers in the photo, though I’m sure they were

there – just a lonely woman with a baby in her arms and her other two children holding tight to her

skirt. Stoic, unwavering, supporting their tiny lives – helping them as best as any mother could – she walked them towards the gas chamber. You could almost hear the silence, smell the terror.

I stared at it, both uplifted and devastated by the stark image of a family and a mother ’s endless love. A small voice inside, a child’s voice, kept telling me something I’ve never forgotten: I would have such as to have known her. Then a hand fell on my shoulder. It was Bill, come to find me. I could see from his eyes he’d been crying.

Overwhelmed, he indicated the piles of shoes and small items such as hairbrushes that the inmates

had left behind. ‘I didn’t realize how powerful ordinary things can be,’ he said.

Finally, we walked up a path inside the old electrified fence towards the exit gates. As we wound our way up, he asked me, ‘Did you see the part about the gypsies?’

I shook my head: no.

‘They lost even more in percentage terms than the Jews.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ I said, trying to be grown up.

‘Nor did I,’ he replied. ‘They don’t call it the Holocaust, the gypsies. In their language they have another name for it. They call it the Devouring.’

We walked the rest of the way to the car in silence and flew back to Paris that night. By some unspoken agreement, we never mentioned to Grace where we had been. I think we both knew she would never have understood.

Months later, a couple of nights before Christmas, I walked down the stairs at the quiet house in Greenwich and was stopped by voices raised in anger. ‘Five million dollars?’ Grace was saying incredulously. ‘Still, you do what you like, I suppose – it’s your money.’

‘Damn right it is,’ he agreed.

‘The accountant says it’s going to an orphanage in Hungary,’ she said. ‘That’s another thing I don’t understand – what do you know about Hungary?’

‘Not much. Apparently, it’s where a lot of gypsies came from; it’s a gypsy orphanage,’ he said, more or less evenly.

She looked at him like he was crazy. ‘Gypsies?
Gypsies?!
’

Then they turned and saw me watching from the doorway. Bill’s eyes met mine and he knew that I

understood.
Porrajmos
, as the gypsies say in Romani – the Devouring.

After that Christmas, I enrolled at Caulfield Academy, a really phoney high school that took pride

in ‘providing every student with the means to lead a fulfilling life’.

Given the staggering fees, that aspect was probably already taken care of – you had to have about

six generations of blue chips behind you even to get in the gate.

The second week I was there we were doing a course to improve our skills at public speaking –

only Caulfield Academy could dream up classes like that. The topic someone picked out of a hat was

motherhood, and we spent thirty minutes listening to guys talk about what their moms had done for them, which was probably nothing, and funny stuff that happened at the villa in the South of France.

Then I got called on, so I stood up, pretty nervous, and started telling them about pine trees in summer and the long road up into the mountains, and I tried to explain this photo I’d seen and how I knew the mother loved her kids more than anything in the world, and there was this book I’d read by

somebody whose name I couldn’t remember and he had this expression ‘sorrow floats’ and that’s what I felt about the photo, and I was trying to tie all this together when people started laughing and asking what I was smoking, and even the teacher, who was a young chick who thought she was sensitive but wasn’t, told me to sit down and stop rambling on and maybe I should think twice before I ran for high elective office, and that made everybody laugh even louder.

I never got up to speak in class after that, not in the five years I was at Caulfield, no matter what amount of trouble it caused. It made people say I was a loner, there was something dark about me, and I guess they were right. How many of them adopted the secret life or ended up killing half as many

people as I did?

Here’s the strange thing, though – through all that difficulty and the passage of twenty years, time hasn’t dimmed my memory of that photo. It has only made it sharper – it lies in wait for me just before I go to sleep and, try as I might, I’ve never been able to get it out of my head.

Chapter Twelve

I WAS THINKING of it once again as I walked out of the front doors of Clément Richeloud & Cie and into the Geneva sunshine. Sure, I could have felt some sympathy for Markus Bucher and his daughter,

but I couldn’t help remembering that it was Swiss bankers like Bucher and his family who had helped

fund and support the Third Reich.

I have no doubt the mother in the photo and millions of other families in cattle cars would have gladly traded the Buchers’ couple of hours of discomfort for what they eventually got. It was just like Bill had said all those years ago: it’s important to keep things in perspective.

Thinking about the dark history that clung to so much of Geneva’s hidden wealth, I walked to the

rue du Rhône, turned right, stopped near the entrance to the Old Town and made an encrypted call on

my cellphone to a Greek island.

The bank ledgers in the briefcase which was now handcuffed to my wrist were Christos Nikolaides’

death warrant, and in the world in which I dwelt there were no appeals and no last-minute stays of execution. As it turned out, killing him wasn’t a mistake – but the way I did it certainly was.

There were five assassins – three men and two women – waiting for my call on Santorini. With its

azure harbour, achingly white houses rimming the cliffs and donkeys shuttling visitors up to jewel-

box boutiques, it is the most beautiful of all the Greek islands.

Dressed in chinos and capri pants, the team was invisible among the thousands of tourists who visit

the island every day. The weapons were in their camera cases.

Months before, as the mysterious Nikolaides family had moved ever more clearly into our sights,

we had taken an interest in a former ice-breaker called the Arctic N. Registered in Liberia, the 300-foot boat, capable of withstanding just about any kind of attack, had been converted at huge expense into a luxury cruiser complete with a helicopter pad and an on-board garage for a Ferrari.

Supposedly fitted out for the super-elite Mediterranean charter business, the weird thing was that it only ever had one client – Christos Nikolaides and his entourage of babes, hangers-on, business associates and bodyguards.

All through summer we kept tabs on the boat by satellite, and while we were in Grozny and Bucharest chasing traitors and drug dealers, we watched the endless party glide from St Tropez down

to Capri until finally it pulled in to the hollowed-out volcano that forms the harbour at Santorini.

And there the vessel stayed – Nikolaides and his guests relocating every day from the boat’s huge

sun deck up to the town’s restaurants and nightclubs and back down again.

Meanwhile, half a continent away, I waited on a street corner in Geneva for a phone to be answered.

When it did, I said three words to a man sitting in a clifftop café. ‘That you, Reno?’ I asked.

‘Wrong number,’ he said, and hung up. Jean Reno was the name of the actor who played the assassin in the movie Léon, and the team leader sitting in the café knew it meant death.

He nodded to his colleague, who immediately called the other three agents, who were sitting among milling tourists at other cafés. The five of them rendezvoused just near the beautiful Rastoni bar and restaurant, looking for all the world like a group of affluent European holidaymakers meeting up for lunch. The two women in the squad were the primary shooters, and that, I’m afraid,

was my mistake.

It was just before two, the restaurant still crowded, when my so-called holidaymakers walked in.

The three men spoke to the harried manager about a table while the women moved to the bar,

ostensibly to check their make-up in its mirror but in fact noting in the reflection the position of every person in the vaulted space.

Christos and his posse – three Albanian bodyguards and a clutch of chicks his mother had probably

warned him about – were sitting at a table looking straight out at the harbour.

‘All set?’ one of our women asked her male colleagues in passable Italian, framing it as a question

but meaning it as a statement. The men nodded.

The women had their tote bags open, putting away their lipstick, reaching for their camera cases.

They both pulled out stainless-steel SIG P232s and turned in a tight arc.

Christos’s bodyguards, with their True Religion jeans, muscle-man T-shirts and Czech machine pistols, didn’t have a chance against real professionals. Two of them didn’t even see it coming – the first they heard was the sound of bone breaking as bullets slammed into their heads and chests.

The third bodyguard made it to his feet, a strategy which succeeded only in presenting himself as a

bigger target for the team leader. Shows how much he knew. The agent hit him with three bullets, which was unnecessary, as the first one pretty much blasted his heart out the back of his chest.

As is usual in these situations, a lot of people started yelling, to absolutely no effect. One of them was Christos, trying to take command, I guess, scrambling to his feet, reaching under his flapping linen shirt for the Beretta he kept in the waistband of his pants.

Like a lot of tough guys who don’t do any real training, he thought he was well prepared by keeping the safety catch off. In the panic of a genuine firefight, he pulled the weapon out, put his finger on the trigger and shot himself through the leg. Fighting the pain and humiliation, he kept turning to face his attackers. What he saw were two middle-aged women, feet planted wide, who – had

there been a band – looked like they were about to start a strange dance.

Instead, they both opened up at seven yards, two rounds each. Most of Christos’s vital organs –

including his brain – were finished before he dropped.

Immediately, the five agents sprayed their weapons across the mirrors, creating a lot of impressive

noise and maximum panic. Terrified diners sprinted for the doors, a Japanese tourist tried to film it on his phone and a ricocheting bullet hit a female member of Christos’s party in the butt. As one of our women agents told me later – given the way the chick was dressed, the last time she had that much pain up her ass she was probably getting paid for it.