The Broken Sword (5 page)

Paris, France

T
he newspapers called him
Thanatos, Greek for death.

How they had come to the conclusion that he was Greek was uncertain. A dropped exclamation in his native language, perhaps, during his younger days before he had learned how to be silent.

He was silent now, so silent that, in his other life, the life open to public scrutiny, he sometimes had to remind himself to walk so that others could hear him.

He opened the morning's edition of
Le Figaro
. There on the front page was the story of how the American ex-President had been the target of a would-be assassin.

Would-be
, he thought, disgusted. This failure would ruin his reputation. He read on. By a seeming miracle, the story went on, William Marshall had escaped the incident uninjured.

He tossed the paper aside angrily. The bullet had entered Marshall's body cleanly, near the heart. He had seen it strike, had watched the blood boil up out of the diplomat's mouth. And then he had watched the cup heal him without a mark.

Thanatos slumped into a chair and threw his head back. His career as an assassin was over.

He sighed. It was of no consequence, really, to anything except his pride. Murder had always been more of a hobby than a career for him, anyway. He had certainly never needed the money. The fact that he was perhaps the highest paid professional assassin in the world was strictly a matter of prestige.

And excitement, he supposed. At least in the beginning.

H
is real name was
Aubrey Katsuleris, and it was a famous one. Mounted on one wall of his bedroom was a blowup of a cover of
International Artist
magazine, bearing a self-portrait of Aubrey's face and the caption
Katsuleris: The Warlock Women Love.

The original portrait was hanging in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The Pompidou had offered a good price for it, but Aubrey felt the French had execrable taste in their museums. They hung as much as they could in any space available, without regard to the style of the artist. He could not abide the thought of one of his angular, dark paintings resting for the next fifty years beside some vapid neoclassicist.

He had taken the blowup and created another painting around it which itself was one of his most brilliant works. With color and the spiky acute angles that were his trademark, the painting conveyed Aubrey's very essence. For the people who saw it—and several collectors had already made six-figure offers for it—the painting was both disturbing and irresistible, like its creator.

"He is a twenty-first century Dracula," the magazine article had stated. Aubrey had smiled at that. It had described his Paris apartment as "vampire chic" and his sprawling villa in Tangier as "the Valhalla of the gods of darkness."

That last, perhaps, was truer than they knew.

The article had been tongue-in-cheek," written for a sophisticated audience, so Aubrey had smiled charmingly at the questions about his notorious private life. No, he was not a demon genius, he answered. He had had parents like everyone else, although fortunately they had been wealthy enough to raise Aubrey in an atmosphere of privilege in which he could pursue his talent.

The only son of an elderly Greek shipping magnate and an English countess with a passion for art (and artists), Aubrey had been reared in several magnificent homes around the world, all filled with priceless treasures. The house on the Ile St. Louis in Paris was decorated entirely in the Art Nouveau style, from the authentic Tiffany chandelier to the stained glass windows designed by Lalique and painstakingly reconstructed piece by piece. The home in Athens was a treasure trove of classical sculpture, as was the villa in the Apennine foothills outside Rome. The stately eighteenth-century stone mansion on St. James Square was filled with Joshua Reynolds' dogs and Gainsborough's pretty children. There was a house of Impressionists in Geneva, a Bauhaus structure in Berlin stocked with the best of the postwar modernists, a replica of a Chinese palace in Kowloon housing a fortune in Ming and Tang dynasty porcelain.

And in each of those marvelous houses had been a man to keep Aubrey's mother company. With her unfailing sense of order, Madame Katsuleris chose only those suitors whose work fit the style of the house in which she received them.

So it was that when she met the artist Saladin, whose work was unlike anything she had ever encountered, she had been obliged to build another home.

She chose Tangier, the most international of cities, as its location. The structure was a sprawling series of cubes designed by Saladin himself, and filled with his own work. From the beginning, Aubrey had been fascinated by the artist who resided in this unusual house. He was nothing like his mother's other lovers, who all seemed to be whining, spoiled children who deferred absolutely to Madame's authority. They fawned on Aubrey with a false and nervous concern, and Aubrey did his best to make them as uncomfortable as possible, treating them much as he did the constantly changing tutors who travelled with him and his mother. These men were little more than servants—the tutors for him, the lovers for his mother—and did not merit any more respect or attention than the groundskeepers or the kitchen help.

But Saladin was different. Everything about him was different. For one thing, the man was nearly seven feet tall. His long arms and delicate fingers were like the wings of some exotic bird. His skin—the little Aubrey saw of it, since Saladin preferred to dress in ornate Oriental robes of his own design—was as smooth as a baby's. He wore a moustache and an extraordinarily long goatee, which gave him the air of a Chinese mandarin.

But the most telling feature about him was his eyes. They were a killer's eyes, cold, intelligent, merciless. From the moment he met Saladin, Aubrey loved his eyes.

His work, too, was leagues apart from anything Aubrey or his mother had seen before. The paintings were done in an astonishing variety of styles, from Byzantine to abstract, in every conceivable medium. Yet even Aubrey, at the age of ten, knew that these were not imitations of old masters. Each bore Saladin's unmistakable stamp, which gave them all an air of foreboding and darkness and, for the boy, pure seduction. The first time Aubrey saw Saladin's abstracts—displayed, naturally, in a room by themselves—he experienced an erection of such power that he had been forced to leave the room in pain.

Saladin's work was death personified. Death as a beautiful, terrifying and inexorable force, death as lover. Saladin loved death. That was what showed in his eyes.

His last works, which he completed at the villa in Tangier, were painted plaster sculptures. Terrible, powerful sculptures, realistic in every detail down to the flash of shock in their eyes, of people caught in the moment of death. The poses were often hideous, but the workmanship and the painting were so glorious that they seemed more vibrant than living beings.

When Madame Katsuleris showed these pieces to a dozen international collectors in a private exhibition, their response was immediate and visceral. Aubrey, at the age of fourteen, could see in their eyes the same mixture of sexual desire and shame that he himself had felt. In the end, each one of the collectors had, very discreetly, purchased one of the works at an astronomical price.

It was shortly after this exhibit that Saladin left the villa. His departure was sudden. He took nothing except the money brought in by the sale of his sculptures. He left no note. Aubrey's mother was beside herself with what could only be called grief, eventually selling all her other properties and artwork and returning to her husband in Athens.

Although Aubrey's father was nearing eighty at the time, he outlived his young wife by two full years. Madame Katsuleris died without a further word from her vanished lover.

W
hen Saladin finally did
reappear, only Aubrey was left. He was twenty-one then, and completing a degree in art history at the Sorbonne while experimenting with painting. He had had no desire to take over his father's shipping business; when the old man finally died, Aubrey had been left with an inheritance of over three billion dollars.

One evening he walked into his Paris apartment to find all his paintings lined up against the walls, with a candle in front of each. Saladin sat in a slingback chair in the center of the room, his long limbs folded near his body like a great spider. He was smoking, and in the candlelight the effect was enhanced by the smoke curling white around him like a finely spun web.

"They're imitative," Saladin said, not moving from his position. "Fortunately, though, you've imitated me, so they're rather good."

After an initial moment of shock, Aubrey let out his breath with a grin. "Where in the world have you been?" he asked.

"Oh, nowhere in particular. I bought a house in the south of England. Hideous weather." He handed Aubrey the still-burning butt of his cigarette to put out for him. "How long has it been, really? You look older."

"Seven years," Aubrey answered, tossing the butt in the fireplace. "You left when I was fourteen."

"Seven years," Saladin mused. "You were still a child then."

Aubrey moved closer to him in the candlelight. "On the other hand,
you
look exactly the same," he said, nonplussed.

That was the amazing thing about Saladin. From the time Aubrey had met him at the age of ten, the man seemed never to have aged a day. "Just how old are you?"

The tall man laughed. "I lost count long ago," he said.

Aubrey had let it go at that. He brought out a bottle of good wine and poured a glass for each of them. "My mother died four years ago," he said quietly.

"Did she?" Saladin's voice exhibited only the most casual interest.

"Before she died, she sold all her houses except the villa in Tangier. Your paintings are still there, if you want them."

Saladin waved him away. "They were never of any importance."

"Would you like the house?"

Saladin thought for a moment. "Very well, that might be useful. I may have to evade the authorities for a time."

"The police? Whatever for?"

Saladin sipped his wine. "Do you remember my sculptures? The dead?"

"Of course. What was so wonderful about them was that they were so vibrantly
alive
—"

"Yes, yes. Well, one of them was broken in transit, and the police found the body inside."

Aubrey blinked. For several seconds he could say nothing. Finally he whispered, "The
body?"

Saladin sighed. "It was The Washerwoman. I was never happy with the midsection. Too much fat."

"Oh, my God. That's why they were so realistic."

"It most certainly was not!" Saladin snapped. "Try covering a body with plaster, and see how realistic it looks. The body was a sort of joke, a little surprise. Rather like the inside of a Tootsie Pop."

Aubrey leaned against a table, resting his forehead in his hand. "How did you get them... her? The prototype of the washerwoman."

"I killed her, of course. Cleaved her chest with an axe. The impact of the piece was dramatic, but the axe threw the weight of the thing all out of balance. I'd never do that again, never."

Aubrey coughed. "Excuse me," he said, and staggered to the bathroom. When he returned, his hands were trembling and his breath smelled of mouthwash. Saladin laughed.

"You're suffering over the death of the washerwoman, I suppose," he said gleefully. "Were you very close? Or, like John Donne, does every man's death diminish you?"

"If you'll pardon my impertinence, Saladin, I don't find the act of murder quite as amusing as you do." Aubrey tried to affect a look of icy dignity.

Saladin laughed louder. "Do stop, Aubrey. The righteous pretense of the bourgeoisie doesn't suit you."

"There is such a thing as right and wrong!"

"Is there?" Saladin asked innocently.

"Yes. And the taking of human life is wrong."

"Except in war."

"Well, of course."

"Or when the victim is a convicted wrongdoer."

"I hadn't—"

"Or an unborn child. Or the holder of power. You know, here in Paris, the 1789 slaughter of thousands of nobles and their families is still celebrated with great fervor. The murder of the powerful is only considered assassination if the attempt does not end in the transfer of that power. If it does, it's called revolution."

"What are you saying?"

"And the murder of commoners is condoned as well, when it's done in the name of one's god. Witness the Crusades. The Spanish Inquisition. In virtually every ancient culture, innocents were viciously murdered as sacrifices to whichever deity was in fashion."

"Saladin—"

"In feudal Japan, it was entirely permissible for a samurai to test the blade of a new sword by beheading a member of the lowest class. In America, the physician who attended the broken ankle of John Wilkes Booth was executed, even though he'd had no idea that his patient had shot President Lincoln. Don't prattle to me about right and wrong. You don't know the first thing about it."

"And you do, I suppose. Tell me, Saladin, how would you feel about your own death?"

Saladin blinked thoughtfully. "It's the most exciting thing I can imagine," he said at last.

Aubrey sighed and turned toward the window. Outside, the glittering band of the Champs Elysées brightened the dark night. "Why have you come here?" he asked. "Apparently it wasn't to see my mother. I suppose I should be grateful you didn't turn her into one of your statues. You could have called it The Countess."

Saladin smiled ruefully. "Your mother was a lovely creature," he said. "She would have made a marvelous sculpture."

Aubrey threw up his hands.

"Come with me to Morocco," Saladin said. "Until Interpol loses interest in me."

"Do you think I'm as mad as you are?" Aubrey snorted.

"You could be. I've always thought you held great promise. Come, Aubrey. Bring your paints. I'll teach you to be an artist."

"And a murderer?" Aubrey asked archly.