The baroness slowly lifts her old lizard eyes to Billie, and their gazes meet across the soft expanse of grass. She might call out or become agitated, and Billie’s breath stops in her chest.
But the baroness does nothing. She simply sits and drops ash on her lap, staring into the grove of banana trees at the figure she assumes is a ghost. There are so many of them now, ghosts who come and go, reminding her of things that ought to be forgotten. She doesn’t even recognize this one. Is she a girl from the camps? One of those who rode a boxcar and never came back?
The baroness doesn’t know and she hardly cares. The past and present are the same to her. She hates people who have been dead for sixty years and she forgets the girl who cuts her hair. Maybe that is who is standing in the banana trees, the girl who comes once a month with her sharp, shiny scissors and trims the thin wisps on her scalp. She doesn’t think it is time for her haircut, but she could be wrong. She turns away and smokes again and when she looks back, the girl is gone.
Billie draws back in the cover of the banana trees and turns away, anticipation rising.
The baroness will die tonight.
Sometime after midnight, Thierry Carapaz, who has been gone since afternoon, returns with a van. It is rusted and patched and bears the faded logo of a Tanzanian coffee brand. He has rented it with a small wad of used notes of three different currencies. His beard has grown in, thick and dark, and he could easily be mistaken for a local. There is a legend in Zanzibar that a Persian prince once married a Swahili princess and their union resulted in the Shirazi people, traders who inhabit the islands of the Indian Ocean. The beaches are creamy white sand, soft as talc under the feet, and the water is a brilliant turquoise. In a few months, when the news of what he is about to do has faded to a memory, he will return to snorkel along the eastern shore and spend his nights with tourist girls. The locals are prettier, but he has run afoul of too many outraged fathers and brothers. He will try his luck instead with the models who come to shoot catalogs on the beaches. They will untie their bikini strings and uncap their cocaine vials for him, and he will be very happy until they summon him to work again. He is not like Vance Gilchrist or the four women. He doesn’t kill because he is good at it; he kills because it pays well and he has a plan, one that will enable him to rise within the organization and live in the kind of luxury his parents could only have dreamed of.
He brakes the van near the stand of banana trees, making sure it is screened from the baroness’s house should anyone care to look out. But the house is shrouded in darkness, and he imagines he can hear the fitful, restless sleep of the old people inside.
He is standing outside the van, holding an unlit cigarette, when Billie walks up. He mimes a light, but Billie simply shrugs and he pockets the cigarette. She rests against the van, hands thrust into her pockets.
“If you came for a shag, it’ll have to wait until the job is done.” His voice is a whisper, so low it does not carry beyond the banana trees. Her answering laugh could be mistaken for a bird, startled out of sleep.
“God, you have a high opinion of yourself.”
He rests next to her against the van. She is not entirely relaxed; she’s learned never to let her guard down completely, but he doesn’t make a move to touch her.
“I have a pretty good track record,” he tells her.
“I bet you do. Vance sent me to see if there were any problems.”
“Tell Vance he is not my babysitter. If there were problems, I dealt with them.”
“If you want to have a dick-swinging contest with Vance, you’ll have to start it yourself. I’m not telling him anything of the kind.”
It’s his turn to laugh. “You’re a hard woman, Billie.”
“Softness is overrated.”
“Not where I’m from.”
She pauses and they listen for a moment to the night sounds—birds, wind in the banana trees, and far away, the small, slight whine of an engine on the ocean. A fisherman, setting out for his nightly catch.
“Where are you from?”
He shrugs. “Here and there.”
She doesn’t reply and he feels the weight of her silence until he can’t stand it. “France. Burgundy, to be precise. My mother was Algerian and my father was Spanish, from the Balearics. That’s why I like islands,” he says. “It’s in my blood.”
“Was? Your parents are dead?”
“Yes. Before I joined the Museum.”
“So you grew up in Burgundy?”
He makes an impatient gesture. “You ask a lot of questions.”