I Am Pilgrim(27)

Heart spiking hard, I didn’t react – that was the training kicking in. I just let my eyes follow it as casually as I could, cursing that a combination of headlights and traffic prevented me from seeing clearly who was in the back. It didn’t matter, I suppose – I just think it’s nice to know the identity of the people who’ve come to kill you.

The tide of vehicles carried the taxi away, and I knew I didn’t have long: the first pass they locate you, the second they plan the angles, the third they fire. I dropped ten euro on the table and moved fast on to the sidewalk.

I heard a voice behind, yelling – it was the doctor, but I didn’t have time to tell him we couldn’t help feed each other’s habits tonight. I jagged left into Hédiard, the city’s best food store, and moved quickly past pyramids of perfect fruit and into the crowded wine section.

Everything was unfolding in a rush – like it always does in such situations – and while I didn’t have any evidence, my instinct was screaming that it was the Greeks. The old man not only had the financial clout but also the deep emotional motive to search for revenge – the sort of incentive every missed Christmas and birthday would only have made stronger. He also had easy access to the personnel: crime intelligence reports from any police force in Europe would tell you that half of Albania was involved in the murder-for-hire business.

From Hédiard’s wine department, a door accessed a side street and I went through it without pause, turning left. It was a one-way street and I walked fast towards the oncoming traffic, the only strategy in the circumstances. At least you can see the shooter coming.

Scanning the road ahead, I realized I was acting to a well-organized plan. I didn’t know it until then but, wherever I went, part of me was always thinking about the best way out, an unseen escape programme constantly running in the background of my mind. My biggest regret was about my gun.

A cup of coffee, a quick meeting with the doctor and a cab home – half an hour maximum, I had figured. That meant the gun was in a safe back at the apartment. I had grown sloppy, I guess. Even if I saw them coming, there was little I could do now.

Home was exactly where I was heading – first thing, to open the damn safe and get myself weaponed up. I turned right, walked fast for a block, turned left and met the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré exactly where I wanted – just down the road from the Élysée Palace. Whichever Greek or Albanian was in the taxi would know it was the safest street in Paris – snipers on the rooftops, the whole length under constant anti-terrorist surveillance. Only now did I feel comfortable enough to grab a cab.

I got the driver to stop hard against my building’s service entrance. By cracking open the door of the cab and staying low I could unlock the steel door and get inside without anybody seeing me. The driver thought I was crazy – but then his religion thinks stoning a woman to death for adultery is reasonable, so I figured we were about even.

Slamming the door behind me, I ran through the underground garages. The limestone building had once been a magnificent town house, built in the 1840s by the Comte du Crissier, but had fallen into ruin. The previous year it had been restored and turned into apartments, and I had rented one on the first floor. Even though it was small, normally someone in my situation would never have been able to afford it, but my material circumstances had changed – Bill Murdoch had died three years ago while I was on a brief assignment in Italy.

I wasn’t invited to the funeral, and that hurt – I just got a note from Grace telling me he had died suddenly and had already been buried. That was my adoptive mother for you – jealous to the end. A few months later I got a letter from a lawyer saying Bill’s matrix of companies – controlled by an offshore trust – had been left to Grace. It wasn’t unexpected – they had been married for forty years. The letter said that, while there was no provision for me, Grace had decided to set aside enough money to provide me with an income of eighty thousand dollars a year for life. It didn’t spell it out but the tone was clear: she believed it discharged all her responsibilities towards me.

Two years after the arrangement – almost to the day – Grace herself died. I felt her earlier behaviour relieved me of any obligation and I didn’t go back for the huge society funeral at Greenwich’s old Episcopalian church.

Again, and not for the first time, I was alone in the world, but I couldn’t help smiling at what a difference two years can make: had the order of their deaths been reversed, I knew Bill would have made a substantial bequest to me. As it was, Grace left everything to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to rebuild the Old Masters gallery in her name.