I Am Pilgrim(20)

‘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.