Chapter Twenty-Five

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

JULY 1981

“Zanzibar,” Mary Alice says, letting her breath hang on the last syllable. “Can you imagine? I’ve never heard of anything so romantic in my life.”

“Romantic? We’re going to kill an old woman,” Billie reminds her, but she is smiling. It is the first time they have worked together since killing the bishop in Rome fifteen months before, and it feels good to be reunited even if they have been relegated to supporting roles. They are backing up Vance Gilchrist and Thierry Carapaz, a Frenchman they met up with at the airport in London. Carapaz carried their documents identifying them as a group of graduate archaeological students excavating the ruins of an old clove plantation in Zanzibar. The plantation is adjacent to the house of their target—Baroness Elisabeth von Waldenheim, a prominent Nazi whose whereabouts have been unknown for the better part of forty years.

But the Provenance department has done its job well, positively identifying the reclusive baroness through the hairdresser who comes once a week to wash and set her hair. The baroness lives with her art collection and a pair of servants who have worked for her since she sat at the center of the Führer’s inner circle. The art collection—pieces purloined with the help of Hermann Göring—is to be saved but the servants are not. The dossier prepared by Provenance is thorough, and the Volkmars’ guilt is never in question. Their crimes, and those of the baroness, are detailed at length. Included in the dossier are maps of the house and its grounds and photographs of the targets and the art collection.

One photograph in particular has captured Billie’s attention. It is poor, black-and-white and blurred—no doubt a fourth- or fifth-generation photocopy—and inked around the border are the words The Queen of Sheba Arising by Sofonisba Anguissola. The notes say the photograph was taken in 1931, the last known image of the painting. The subject is a common one in Renaissance and Baroque art. Claude Lorrain, Tintoretto, Lavinia Fontana—all have painted the Queen of Sheba garbed in elaborate clothing contemporary to their time, rich brocades and heavy velvets giving witness to her legendary wealth as she makes her first appearance at the court of King Solomon.

But Anguissola has chosen differently. To begin with, she has painted a woman with dark skin, Billie sees. Where other artists have chosen to depict the queen with the fashionable blond tresses of the Renaissance ideal, Anguissola depicts her as she would have been—an African queen. And where others have painted her arriving at the court of Solomon, received with fanfare and lavish ceremony, Anguissola has chosen to portray her rising from her bed after her tempestuous night with the king, grasping a white sheet for contrast against her skin. Her hands and wrists are hung with gorgeous jewels, rubies and emeralds, Billie guesses, although it is impossible to tell from the black-and-white reproduction. One enormous pearl hangs from a tiny chain threaded through her curls, resting voluptuously on her brow. There is a knowingness in the eyes that says she understands and knows you do too. Behind her is a stately bed, gilded and hung with swags of velvet draperies. And just visible in the tangle of tousled bedclothes is the bare thigh of a sleeping man, his luscious robes and hastily discarded bits of armor strewn about the floor. The queen’s heavy-lidded eyes say it all. She hasn’t slept because she has been too busy conquering a king. It is sensual and yet domestic, an intimate moment of grand people, and Billie is glad that her job will be helping to restore the painting to its rightful owners.

She does not think about the baroness or the Volkmars as they make their preparations. They are camping at the clove plantation in the ruins of the overseer’s house, planning to use the punishment cells beneath to access a tunnel that runs from the main house to the area that once housed the enslaved farmworkers. Vance has explained that the original owner, not wanting his gardens spoiled by workers coming and going, ordered the tunnel dug to keep them out of sight. It has been decades since the tunnel was in use, but they will have a week to shore it up and surveil the baroness. Carapaz will take care of dispatching the Volkmars while Vance has reserved the baroness for himself. She is the first Nazi the Museum has targeted in over a decade, and taking her out will ensure a promotion. Money, status—these are important to Vance, but nothing means as much as going down in the history of the Museum as a Nazi killer. It is the reason the Museum exists, and it is a demonstration of the board’s faith in him that they have assigned him leadership of the mission. The women are to give weight to the cover story as a student expedition and to secure the paintings and that is all.

Their duffel bags and backpacks are full of nondescript clothes from charity shops, dull reference texts from university presses—purchased new but carefully aged—and excavation tools. There are no weapons, no liquor, no pills. Even Natalie’s copy of Scruples has been surrendered. Zanzibar is an Islamic country and they do not want to attract any attention from the authorities.

They are traveling cheaply, as any academic group on limited funds would do. Their tickets have been purchased in bucket shops and they route them through Naples, connecting on to Cairo and then Mombasa before the bus to Dar es Salaam and the ferry to Zanzibar. By the time they arrive, they look like college kids, wrinkled and dusty and smelling rank. But the sea air is fresh and they have a night booked at a hostel in Stone Town before they have to camp out. In his dual role of mission leader and dig supervisor, Vance gives them a few hours to play tourist. They explore the Zanzibari markets and admire the Gujarati doors throughout the town, carved of teak and heavily embellished with engraved brass ornaments. They take photos of the House of Wonders and bargain badly for souvenirs, coming away with leather slippers and sarongs. Mary Alice buys a handful of colorful beaded bracelets, one for each of them, and helps Vance find a present for his bride—a tiny star sapphire on a thin chain.

The next morning they are up and packed before the first call to prayer. The drive to the former clove plantation where they will be based takes two hours, the last half over bumping, pitted roads that wind north and east, away from the coast and into the interior of the island. They pitch camp with practiced ease, erecting three tents—his, hers, and mess. In case anyone happens by, they set out survey equipment and dig a few test pits, marking them carefully with a string grid.

The days drag by, long and mercilessly hot. They are sick of the waiting, the fitful hours, and the pests. Carapaz has read up on them, taking great pleasure in detailing all the things a yellow sac spider or red-clawed scorpion can do.

“Would you shut up already?” Natalie demands over dinner the third night.

“Come on,” he says, poking an elbow into her ribs. “Don’t you want to hear about the baboon spider? What about the spider wasp? Do you know it has the most painful sting of any insect except the bullet ant?”

Natalie dumps the rest of her food into the fire and stalks off. They are getting on each other’s nerves, tired of the bush bathroom and the nights of broken sleep. And worst of all is the endless waiting, the hours of poking listlessly in the trenches they have dug, pretending to excavate. They casually watch the Volkmars move around the property, the old man clipping listlessly at a clump of ginger lilies, the wife pegging out laundry on a sagging clothesline.

One evening, Billie steps out of the mess tent and inhales deeply. The air in Zanzibar smells different than anywhere else. The sharp green fragrance of unripe spices, the salt of the sea. And above it, something else, the thin odor of cigarettes. She follows the smell to a stand of banana trees and parts them. She is not far from the baroness’s veranda, maybe twenty yards. And she can see the old woman sitting in the shadows, hunched in a wheelchair. Someone has rolled her outside to watch the sunset, or maybe it’s to keep the stink of her cigarette out of the house.

As she watches, the caretaker’s wife comes outside. Frau Volkmar flaps her hand, saying something in German. It is not the northern German that Billie knows. Instead, it’s an Austrian dialect, and it sounds irritable. She shoves the old woman forward, moving a thin pillow around before stuffing it back into place and stalking off with another few words flung over her shoulder.

The baroness doesn’t respond. She simply sits, smoking, the gray worm of the ash dropping to her nightgown. She was beautiful once. There is a studio portrait of her in the dossier, blond hair swept back and held in place with a diamond clip in the shape of a parteiadler. Her expression is one of perfect contentment. She knows exactly who she is and what she wants. It is taken at the height of her power, although she doesn’t know it.

It is hard to reconcile that woman with the shrunken figure huddled in the wheelchair. She doesn’t always remember to take the cigarette out of her mouth to tap the ash, but when she does, a thin silver thread of drool stretches from her lip and Billie almost wants to pity her.

Almost. She sees the indignity of old age, how life becomes very small until there is nothing left of independence and power and beauty and freedom except a shell of a body that relies upon others for everything. It is terrible to witness, but it is hers, Billie reflects. Whatever it looks like, this life has been lived. And that is something the baroness took from others when she had the chance.

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.”

“I’m curious about people.”

“Yes, I grew up in Burgundy. On a winemaking estate. Don’t get ideas—it didn’t belong to my family. My parents worked for the people who owned it. Maman scrubbed floors and did the laundry. My father worked in the vineyard, spraying the vines with some toxic shit that ended up killing him. It was slow and ugly. Maman’s cancer was fast.” He paused and gave her a close look. “You don’t seem sad for me. Usually when I tell my tragic story, a girl would already be unbuttoning her blouse by this point.”

“I have sad stories of my own,” she says.

“Tell me and maybe I’ll unbutton my blouse,” he offers.

She smiles. “I like you a little more than I want to but not nearly as much as you think I do.”

“Fair enough.” He pauses and cocks his head, studying her face in the dim starlight. “So what do you want out of this job, American girl?”

“Well, I like to travel and the money’s good.”

He nods and she lobs the question back. “What do you want out of the job, French boy?”

“Money. Girls. A really nice car. And a house—a town house in Paris. I even know the exact one.” Billie raises a brow and he goes on. “The family in Burgundy, the one my parents worked for, they owned this town house. Like three hundred years of the same assholes living there, lording it over everybody. It’s abandoned now. But someday, I’m going to have enough money to buy it.” He pauses and cocks his head. “So, how did they find you?”

She tells him, giving him the bare facts of her arrest for assault, and he grins again. “Same. Only I was eighteen and it was for arson. It is why the Museum decided I should specialize in setting fires.”

“What did you burn?”

“The vineyard where my father worked.”

“Jesus.”

“And the house. With the family in it. That’s why the town house in Paris is abandoned.”

“They died?”

“All of them. Even the dog.”

He consults his watch and pushes away from the van. “Come on. It’s time.”