“Madame Paulin,” she was greeted by the younger of the two teachers. “Bonjour, Charlot.” She smiled at Finn.
Finn didn’t yet know there were two languages, only that he spoke different words for the same things at home and at school; and that sometimes his mother called him Charlot and sometimes Finn. He didn’t seem to mind.
“A quinze heures, c’est bon?” the teacher said to Anna.
“Oui. Et merci.” Three o’clock would be fine. She’d be back long before then.
“De rien,” the teacher said, and smiled. “Bonne journee.”
Anna let go of the boy’s hand. He didn’t look back, safe in the company of the women and his friends.
She returned to the house around the path through the fields. M. Barry was cranking the portable sawmill on the other side of the street from her house. There was a pile of tree limbs and bits of broken fencing, ready to be cut.
She’d learned that M. Barry, like the others, prepared long in advance for the winter. It was cold up here, not like in Russia, but a damp, chilling cold that entered the bones.
She wished him good morning, and he raised his cap; same clothes, same cap, summer and winter. He was a handsome man in his sixties, with a wife who suffered from Parkinson’s disease. He’d told Anna once that he had never been beyond Uzes, seven miles away, in his entire life. In a year, she had come to enjoy her fleeting conversations with him out by the sawmill, conversations that went beyond the natural reserve of the other villagers. He had quietly assumed a paternalistic role of looking out for her.
“You need anything?” he enquired. “I’ll have some wood soon, but anything else?”
“I don’t think so. Thank you for asking.”
He was kind to her and her son. He gave them homemade cheese sometimes, or sausage he made himself from one of the wild boars shot in winter.
“It’s hot now, but soon it will be autumn,” he said, as if to explain the woodpile. But she thought he looked awkward, more so than usual.
He paused, raised his cap, and scratched his head. He seemed to be thinking of what to say, not like his normal, relaxed manner at all.
“You are not too lonely?” he suddenly asked.
This was out of character—too intimate, she felt. But there was something about his face that told her he was serious.
“No, not lonely,” she replied and smiled.
“Never any visitors,” he remarked, again pricking her into wariness. It was not the type of conversation they had. There was never anything personal. Not like this at all. But equally she felt drawn to reply honestly, without fear.
“No. Never any visitors,” she replied. “Apart from Willy.”
Willy and M. Barry had struck up a joint friendship, in the unspoken cause of her protection.
M. Barry paused and lifted his cap again and wiped the sweat from his head with the back of the same hand. Then he took out a tobacco pouch and began to roll a cigarette. As he did so, he spoke, as if he needed something to do in order to say what he was going to say.
“Not the man on Saturday, then,” he said.
She immediately froze. “Saturday?”
“He came to your gates. No farther. I thought you must be out walking.”
“Did he ring the bell, then?
“No. No, he didn’t.”
He put the cigarette in his mouth, lit it, and picked up the crank handle for the sawmill.
She was silent, her mind racing through the events of Saturday, looking for something out of the ordinary.
“What did he look like?” she asked.
“He was slim, about your age I should think. White jacket. I didn’t see him close to. He looked like an athlete, perhaps.”
“A car? Did he have a car?”
“Not that I saw.”
“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you, Monsieur Barry. I appreciate it.”
He tipped his cap and gave her a broad, confident smile.
“I’ll have plenty of wood for you when winter comes, don’t you worry,” he said, and began to crank the handle again.
She walked around to the side of the house. She had the numbers to call in an emergency, but what could she say?
A man had come to the house. White jacket.
She paused and seemed to remember a man in Uzes on Saturday. He wore a white jacket, she remembered. It was certainly enough of a reason to call Paris, but she was reluctant. She didn’t want to shatter the illusion she’d enjoyed moments before that her life had become safe. She decided to mention it to Willy first.
On entering the house, she took a gun from the locked drawer in the kitchen. It was a Thompson Contender pistol, a handgun that was unique for its range. With just a twelve-inch barrel, it could hit a target at over two hundred yards if you were good enough. And she was good enough. She realised she hadn’t taken it out of the drawer for over a month.
She put her cell phone in the pocket of a jacket and took the car keys from the table by the door. She looked around finally, expecting to see something out of the ordinary, but the old farmhouse seemed calm. It had been built in the year of the French Revolution. There was a stone engraved with the date by the front gate. Maybe down here, in the small places, even great events like revolutions went unnoticed.
Locking the door behind her, she opened the big metal gates and drove the Mercedes out. She placed the gun under the driver’s seat. Then she closed the gates behind her.
There was a pile of sand by the wall of the next house, left there after some building job had been completed. She was suddenly alert, her trained instincts activated. She stepped out of the car and sprinkled a little sand around the gates, not so much as would be noticed, but enough if you were looking for the faintest sign of a footprint later.
Chapter 8
LARS SHADED HIS EYES against the high sun. Then he cast his gaze down again towards the monastery. It was tucked away in a grove of cypresses and pines, across an isthmus on a flat, man-made island out in the bay. Flipping the pages of a tourist guide, he pretended to study what he already knew. The monastery had been built in the eleventh century as a sanctuary for Orthodox Christians fleeing the Turkish invasion of Serbia. Inside its weathered, arched dark wood gates was a courtyard of rough flagstones in the cypress shade, and then a tiny church dedicated to Saint Sava of Serbia.
A few yards beyond the little white church was the monastery, built a few centuries later.
He looked up from the guidebook. It had been a month since his first visit, and he knew the layout from memory. The key element for his second visit was the tall bell tower that protruded above the monastery on the side of the island facing the open sea. Once again, he studied the height and position of the tower carefully. The tower had once doubled as a lighthouse for sailors from Venetian trading fleets, Levantine merchant vessels, Arab dhows, and Turkish
Lars waited in the hot sun at the edge of the group of tourists.
There was an American couple, the woman with frizzy hair and a pinched, nervous face, the man taller by a head, with a flabby grin. He looked bulky in huge shorts and an open shirt. The others were local, Montenegrins or citizens from the surrounding Balkan countries; an old woman dressed in black; a young couple who couldn’t stop touching each other; two women who might have been academics—they looked like they’d be at home in a library,
