I Am Pilgrim
45
was at Caulfield, no matter what amount of trouble it caused. It made people say I was a loner, there was something dark about me, and I guess they were right—how many of them adopted the secret life or ended up killing half as many people as I did? Here’s the strange thing though—through all that difficulty and the passage of twenty years, time hasn’t dimmed my memory of that photo. It has only made it sharper—it lies in wait for me just before I go to sleep and try as I might, I’ve never been able to get it out of my head.
12 I was thinking of it once again as I walked out the front doors of Clément Richeloud & Cie and into the Geneva sunshine. Sure, I could have felt some sympathy for Markus Bucher and his daughter, but I couldn’t help remembering that it was Swiss bankers like Bucher and his family who had helped fund and support the Third Reich. I have no doubt the mother in the photo and millions of other families in cattle cars would have gladly traded the Buchers’ couple of hours of discomfort for what they eventually got. It was just like Bill had said all those years ago—it’s important to keep things in perspective. Thinking about the dark history that clung to so much of Geneva’s hidden wealth, I walked to the rue du Rhône, turned right, stopped near the entrance to the Old Town, and made an encrypted call on my cell phone to a Greek island. The bank ledgers in the briefcase, which was now handcuffed to my wrist, were Christos Nikolaides’s death warrant, and in the world in which I dwelled there were no appeals and no last-minute stays of execution. As it turned out, killing him wasn’t a mistake—but the way I did it certainly was. There were five assassins—three men and two women—waiting for my call on Santorini. With its azure harbor, achingly white houses rimming the cliffs, and donkeys shuttling visitors up to jewel-box boutiques, it is the most beautiful of all the Greek islands.
Hayes_IAmPilgrim_2P_kk.indd 45
11/5/13 5:27 PM