Countdown in Cairo

was responsible for Robert’s death, for the slayings in Barranco Lajoya, for every single venal, hateful thing he’s done, I wonder if at some moment I might have just killed him myself.”

“But you didn’t,” Rizzo said. “You didn’t know and you didn’t kill him.”

“But should I have?”

“Killed him?”

“Yes.”

“Probably not.” He paused. “Did you ever suspect?” he asked.

There was a long silence.

“And would you have?” she finally asked. “If you knew that he’d taken the person you most loved away from you? Would you have just shot him?”

Rizzo’s gaze went far away and came back, much as Federov’s had several minutes earlier.

“I’m a religious man,” he said, “and maybe a little bit superstitious as well. So I’d prefer not to answer that in a place of worship.”

“I’ll take that as a yes,” she said.

“Take it instead as a maybe,” he said. “A definite maybe.”

She nodded. He took his arm away.

“And you?” he asked.

“What about me?”

“If you’d known, would you have killed him?”

She looked away from him and maintained another silence. When he looked back again, her eyes were moist, but something in them had changed-the compassion had changed to anger, or maybe something deeper.

“That’s what I thought,” he said.

He stood. He offered a hand.

“Come along,” he said. “I think it’s my duty right now to get you out of here.”

“Thank you,” she said, accepting his hand and standing.

By then, they had both had enough, so Alex and Rizzo slipped out of the Clinique Perrault without a further word to anyone.

They went for dinner at a small French place on the Place St. Francois. Alex was still in a mode of deep decompression after the visit with Federov, but Rizzo knew how to guide the events.

They split a bottle of wine and talked about life. Gian Antonio rose to the occasion as a gentleman par excellence and talked her out of her anger and depression and fury. The staff of the restaurant sensed that the two needed space and time and, for that matter, a second bottle of wine, so they provided one, a good Swiss one from the Rhone Valley.

She got back to the hotel shortly after midnight, moderately drunk, which was probably a good thing this evening. She crashed into bed and slept fitfully, unable to come down completely, unwilling to pop an Ambien or any other sleeping aide on top of the wine. She was victimized not by nightmares but by bad feelings about all the events of the last year and a half.

The stint in Madrid, the pursuit of the Pieta of Malta, was a small vacation in terms of the larger picture. But looking back on it, she could see the hand of Federov once again making the first moves toward forgiveness and contrition.

She wondered again: If she had known earlier, might she have killed him? Out of pure whim one day, might she have just drawn a weapon and shot him? She pictured herself doing it, probably when she was one-on-one with him in his magnificent study in Geneva.

But in truth, she would never know. It was the road not taken.

She fell into what passed for sleep around 5:00 a.m.

The phone woke her less than three hours later, exploding rudely at her bedside like a fire bell in the night. In a fog, she answered.

It was Rizzo. He asked if she had heard, and if not, he had news.

“Heard what?” she asked.

Federov, Rizzo explained, had slipped into a coma late the previous evening about the time that Alex had tipsily lurched from the restaurant while hanging on Rizzo’s strong arm. In the early morning hours, Federov’s heart had fluttered and then failed. Efforts by the Clinique to move him onto life support had also failed.

There had been no relatives listed with the Clinique. No friends, either. Aside from a solicitor, Rizzo was his only contact. So it had been Rizzo’s cell phone that the Clinique had called at six minutes past seven that morning when Yuri Federov had been pronounced dead at age forty-nine.

FIFTY-SIX

Over the course of the fifteenth century, terrible epidemics of plague, the black death, ravaged Europe. Switzerland was swept by the pestilence as much as any country, and in Geneva, the leaders of the city-in an attempt to quarantine the dying-built a hospital away from the city center. The building sat on a stretch of pasture land called Plainpalais, between the rivers Rhone and Arve.

The surrounding land took the name of the hospital-the plain palace-that stood on the site. And since death from the plague was almost inescapable for the afflicted, it was only a matter of time that the vast fields surrounding the building became burial grounds.

Plainpalais Cemetery, also known as La Cimetiere des Rois, was located on rue des Rois in the center of Geneva. Over the centuries, it had also become the largest cemetery in Geneva. As Federov had indicated, and as Alex had already known, Plainpalais was a peaceful, quiet place, filled with a small settlement of old burial vaults and tomb markers. The pathways within the cemetery were lined with large, aging trees, and there was a bittersweet air to the place, somewhat like the famous Cimetiere Pere Lachaise in Paris.

Some of the gravestones dated back to the late fifteenth century, and notables of Genevois history had been laid to rest here. Here lay John Calvin, the Protestant reformer; Augustin de Candolle, the botanist; Guillaume-Henri Dufour, the engineer and general; James Fazy, jurist and statesman; Emile Jaques- Dalcroze, composer; Charles Pictet de Rochemont, diplomat; as well as many others who, in the course of five centuries, had played a major role in Geneva’s history.

More recently joining them were Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine author of fantastical short stories, and Sergio Vieira de Mello, the former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights who was murdered by a terrorist bomb in Iraq in 2002.

It was bitterly cold on the day that Federov’s ashes were to be interred. True to her promise, Alex had made certain that the cremation had taken place and that the urn containing Federov’s ashes was transferred to the funeral parlor that Federov had designated. The establishment seemed to have an Eastern clientele, as she dealt in Russian with a crafty funeral director named Rodzianko. In keeping with Federov’s wishes, she also ordered a headstone in black granite with Cyrillic letters and, in Russian style, an engraving bearing his likeness.

“That,” she mused with ironic detachment as she signed the papers, “should scare passers-by for another century or two.”

Alex attended the funeral ceremony with Rizzo. They walked a long, cold pathway and arrived punctually at the designated gravesite where a small knot of other attendees also stood. Alex didn’t recognize any of them. Unlike many such ceremonies that Alex had attended in her lifetime, there was no family and there were no tears. There was again a light snow falling, just as there had been for Robert’s interment.

She was in a somber mood, but it was more associations than a sense of loss for the man being buried. As the ceremony began, she wondered if Federov had willed himself into dying, or tinkered with his drugs, while she was still in Switzerland. That way he would make certain that Alex would be in attendance. She was convinced that he had followed one of those courses. Similarly, when she declined to marry him, she was convinced he had released his tenuous grip on life.

The pastor was a young man named LeClerc. He was tall, reed-thin in a heavy coat, and absurdly Harry Potterish with round glasses and an owlish gaze. He conducted the ceremony in French and Russian. His words were brief. A bronze urn rested above an open grave.

It was minus 4 degrees Centigrade. It felt that cold in Fahrenheit.

LeClerc spoke softly, rapidly muttering a prayer that no one could hear. Words on the icy air, brief and appropriate, but impersonal. The knot of people shuffled uncomfortably. Alex counted them. There were eleven-a strange number, but an even dozen including the pastor.

The snow thickened. Then the service was over.

Alex had ordered a bouquet of roses for Federov’s send-off. She took one and laid it on the urn. The flower was frozen but it didn’t matter. Out of decency, Rizzo added a second. Other attendees pitched in, also. No one spoke to anyone else.

Alex and Rizzo turned and started to retrace their path through the cemetery to the exit. They had gone several meters when Alex heard a voice from behind her, a man chasing after her and calling out.

“Mademoiselle? Mademoiselle?”

Alex turned and saw LeClerc hastily pursuing her.

She stopped. So did Rizzo, who remained close. LeClerc arrived slightly breathless and reached to an inside jacket pocket.

“Vous parlez francais, madame?” he asked. “On peut parler francais?” he asked.

She answered, yes, of course. Bien sur, she spoke French.

LeClerc was a little breathless and a little befuddled. He searched several pockets and then found what he was looking for.

“There were some special arrangements today,” the pastor explained in French. “I was asked, or I should say, the deceased requested before his death, that if you arrived here on this day, I should give you something.”

“How did you know who I was?” Alex asked.

“He described you.”