Corsican Honor

by William Heffernan

  It was Saturday afternoon, a bright, sunny day so typical of the south of France, and the neighboring yards were filled with children playing under the lazy watchfulness of their parents.

  Michelle stood at the sliding glass doors that led to a rear patio and watched the family next door. There was one child, a boy about five years old, she thought, and he was building bucket-shaped mounds of dirt in a sandbox, then running to his mother when each construction was completed to accept her expected admiration and approval. The father sat in a chaise, reading a newspaper, but his eyes drifted from the newsprint repeatedly, and Michelle could see a small smile play across his lips as he watched his son.

  It was a painful sight for her, a painting in which she could have been a figure had not Rene and little Pierre been murdered. And she realized with a cold, hurtful stab that she would never know what her child would have been like at five or beyond. He would remain a three-year-old forever, with her final memory of him being the still horrific sight of his tiny white coffin, looking so desolate and alone, as she was taken from the graveyard where he was buried.

  She turned away from the window and fought for composure. All the conflicting horror she had felt about searching out and killing her son’s murderer—about the deaths of the others who had helped him—seemed suddenly absurd. Life was precious, the life of a young child the most precious of all, and those who denied ft, who stole it on a whim, had no right to it themselves. It was not a question of vengeance. That would not ease her pain, or give back an hour of what had been taken from her child. It was a matter of punishment. And that was something, she believed, that was worthy of pursuit.

  Alex had been watching her from a chair across the room. He heard the voices of children filtering in from outside, and he understood the scenario that must be playing out in her mind.

  “Is it hard for you here?” he asked. “In this neighborhood of families and children.”

  She looked across the room at him, as though momentarily confused by where his voice had come from.

  “Yes,” she said. The line of her mouth hardened. “And it offends me too.”

  “How so?”

  “Having this—this safe house here. It isn’t safe at all, is it? It’s a place where people are hidden from others who want to do them harm.” Her eyes bored into him, as though he were somehow responsible. Perhaps because he had done the same himself in the past.

  “And these people don’t know.” She waved her arm, taking in the room, but really the neighborhood. “And if violence comes, they’ll be part of it. And they won’t have done anything to deserve it.”

  “It’s what makes it hard to find,” Alex said. “It’s what makes it safe.”

  “But it’s wrong.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  Michelle’s eyes momentarily filled with tears. “It is what it was like for my husband and my child,” she said. “I heard the police talking about it. They said they were just targets of opportunity.” She shook her head. “Such a cold phrase for what happened.” She stared at him. “You see, my husband never had anything to do with what they are fighting about. The drugs. He was just working for the wrong people in the wrong place at the wrong time. And my child was with him.” She waved her hand toward the window. “Just like these people.”

  Michelle stared at the floor, wondering why she was even speaking about it. She was dressed in a brightly colored blouse and a full summer skirt that had large, deep pockets. She reached into one and withdrew a slender object, then pressed a button on the handle and watched as the long, thin blade of the stiletto snapped into place.

  “Look at what Meme gave me at the park,” she said. “He said it was better than a gun because it was easily hidden, and because no one would look for it on a woman.” She stared at the knife. “He said it was his and that he wanted me to have it. I wonder how many people he’s killed with it.”

  “He just wants you to be able to protect yourself,” Alex said. The words were lame, but they were the only ones he could think to say.

  “He said you’d teach me how to use it,” she said. She looked at him again. Her eyes seemed filled with accusation, as if simply knowing how to use a knife was a confirmation of past guilt, a condemnation. Watching him kill Montoya and his men had altered her feelings, Alex thought. It was difficult to watch someone kill others and feel the same as one had before.

  “Do you want me to show you?” he asked.

  “Yes.” Her voice was firm; there was no hesitation in it.

  Standing, Alex walked to her and took the knife from her hand. He stepped to one side and ran his hand over her upper body, front and back, lightly touching several places so she would remember them. Then he explained how the knife should be held for different killing thrusts.

  He watched her jaw tighten, her eyes blink at the thought. He closed the knife and handed it to her, then turned and walked back across the room.

  “Would you like a drink?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “I want to go out. I want to get away from here for a while. Perhaps go to the cemetery and visit my son’s grave.” She shook her head. “I don’t know, just do something … normal.”

  He had turned back to her, concerned. “I don’t think that’s wise,” he said.

  “I’ll be all right.”

  He nodded. Not certain she would be, but knowing there was nothing he could do to dissuade her. “I’ll go with you.”

  “No.” She tried to smile. “I just need some time alone. Alone with my son.”

  Alex felt helpless. How could he stop her? How could he ask her not to go?

  “You’ll have to take Meme’s men with you,” he said. “I can’t let you go alone.”

  “I’ll take one of them. It will be enough.”

  “Take both,” he said. “Just for my peace of mind.”

  “All right.”

  Michelle walked across the room and rested her head against his chest. She did not place her arms around him, or touch him in any other way.

  “I love you, Alex,” she said. “It’s just hard for me now. Please understand.”

  “I know it is,” he said. He wondered if it would ever be easy for her again.

  The cemetery was on a hill overlooking the sea. Little Pierre was buried here in France, not at home in Corsica. There had been so little left of his small body after the explosion, she had not had the strength to take what remained across the sea, to carry his torn and dismembered body home.

  The thought of it came back to her now, standing before his grave, and the pain surged in her stomach, doubling her over, and she sank to her knees and began to sob.

  The two Pisani men stood far back, glancing at each other nervously, not certain what they should do.

  Michelle reached down and stroked the new grass that covered the grave. Oh, my Pierre, she thought. How I miss you. How I long to hold you again and feel you against me. How I wish I could die and be with you now.

  She drew a deep breath, feeling it catch in her throat. But not before I find him. Not before I can look into the eyes of the man who killed you. Not before … She straightened and drew another breath, fighting for composure. She could not speak to her dead child of what she must do. She could not defile his memory that way. But she would do what must be done, and she would do it coldly, with calculation, and she would see that man die. And if her own life ended doing it, that would be all to the good. Her God would understand. She believed that with all her heart. And He would bring her to her little baby, and they would be together again.

  She stroked the grass again, then rose—surprisingly composed now—and turned to her bodyguards. Tears still stained her cheeks, but her eyes were cold and hard, and it seemed to make the men nervous.

  “I want to go to my office now,” she said, her tone offering no room for objection. She received none. “It will only be for a minute,” she said as she marched past them.

  I will do something normal, she thought as she moved tow
ard the car. If nothing else, I will read my mail and pretend my life is simple and clean and … yes, and human again.

  Michelle’s office was in a baroque building with a caged elevator that held two comfortably, three intimately, and four with a sense of the obscene. But few people ever came to the building in numbers, and on Saturday it had an abandoned, almost lonely quality about it.

  But she had loved it from the first time she had seen it. The building had charm and grace to it, and she had often wished she had known something about its history, and had promised herself that one day she would look into its past, discover who had worked there, and for what purpose it had originally been built. But that would be for another time. When her life was sane again.

  She opened the office door, the two Pisani men behind her, and entered the bright, spacious outer room where her small staff worked. She moved past the empty desks and into her own office. It too was large and gracious, and flooded with light from two floor-to-ceiling windows. And it had the added luxury of a private bath.

  She went to her desk and picked up the stack of mail her secretary had left there awaiting her return. It was all mundane and unimportant, but it gave her a sense of normalcy she had not felt in several weeks. She seated herself behind the desk and began opening the mail.

  “I won’t be long,” she said, glancing up at the two Corsican bodyguards. They were young and looked fit and strong. And they had that air of invincibility about them so common to young men who had no sense of their mortality.

  But they must be quite competent, she told herself. Otherwise Meme would never have used them this way.

  Michelle returned to the mail; she never heard or saw the bathroom door inch open. The two bodyguards remained equally ignorant. They had seated themselves on a large, overstuffed sofa, and they never noticed the thick cylinder of the silencer inch into the opening.

  The single short burst from the silenced Uzi sounded like nothing more than the quiet thumping of an old fan. The sound didn’t startle Michelle. At first she thought it some foolish noise made by one of the two men. And when she looked up from the mail, her initial reaction was disbelief at the sight of the bloody bodies of the two young men sprawled grotesquely across the sofa.

  Her eyes, wide with terror, shifted to a movement at the bathroom door, and she watched the slender, blond man come slowly into view, his small, ugly, still smoking weapon now pointed at her. There was a sneering grin on his face, and she thought, absurdly, that he was about to laugh.

  “That old bastard Pisani should hire better men,” Ludwig said. “Or at least train them to check out a room before they curl up for a nap.” His smile widened at his own joke.

  He stopped in front of her desk and gave a short, Aryan bow, adding a soft click of his heels. The gesture seemed to amuse him even more.

  “Ernst Ludwig, here to serve you, Mademoiselle,” he said. His face took on a look of concern at having made some faux pas. “But I see from your mail, it is Madame, is it not? So I must wonder, where is your husband while you are off fucking my good friend Alex Moran?”

  Michelle glared at him. He didn’t even know who she was. Didn’t even recognize her as a woman whose husband and child he had murdered. She was just a woman, any woman, whom he wished to humiliate.

  “Answer me!” he snapped. “Where is your husband?”

  “He is dead,” Michelle said.

  Ludwig’s face broke into a grin again. “How convenient for you,” he said. “And for dear Alex.” His eyes hardened. “If you don’t wish to join him, do everything I say.”

  Michelle wanted to throw herself at him, find some way to tear at his face, his eyes. To kill him with her hands if she could. But the Uzi made it impossible. And she didn’t want to throw her life away without the satisfaction of taking him with her.

  “Stand up!” he snapped. He watched her rise obediently. “Are you armed?”

  “There is a pistol in my purse,” Michelle said, nodding toward the large straw bag on her desk.

  Ludwig dumped out the contents, picked up the Glock automatic, smiled at it and Michelle in turn, then tucked it into his belt.

  “Anything else?” he asked.

  He watched as she shook her head, then came around the desk and placed the barrel of the Uzi lightly against her jaw. Slowly, pleasurably, he ran his hands along her body, lingering over her breasts and inner thighs, the smile growing as he did. In his effort to humiliate her, to enjoy her body, his hand never touched the stiletto in the pocket of her wide, full skirt. She had forgotten it was there herself, and she vowed now to use it as soon as she could.

  Ludwig stepped back and perched on the edge of the desk so their eyes were at the same level.

  “Where is Alex Moran?” he asked. His voice seemed soft, relaxed, as though the killing he had just done, and the bodies behind him, were all part of some other time and place.

  “I don’t know,” Michelle said.

  His hand shot out, catching her solidly on the side of the jaw, and she staggered back, almost falling against the large window behind her desk. She felt her jaw swelling, but she willed the pain away and glared at him.

  “Tell me the truth!” Ludwig snapped.

  Michelle’s mind began clicking into gear, and she recalled Wheelwright telling them that Alex’s father had undoubtedly met with Ludwig, and had told him about her, about Bugayev, and about the unknown safe house.

  “A man named Bugayev—a Russian, I think—has hidden him somewhere. They did not tell me where,” she said.

  Ludwig’s eyes narrowed, then became suddenly playful. He ran his hand gently along her cheek, allowing the fingers to linger at the corner of her mouth. “Then how does he reach you when his cock gets hard, and he wants to use your beautiful mouth?” he asked.

  Michelle jerked her head away from his touch.

  “Or how do you reach him when you want it?” he said. His voice had remained soft, but his hand snapped out, grabbing her cheeks between his fingers and squeezing tightly.

  “Tell me!” he demanded.

  She fought his hand, then gave up. “One of Bugayev’s men contacts me,” she said.

  He nodded and released her.

  “Bugayev,” he said. “Don’t you find him an exceptionally ugly little man?” he asked. His eyes hardened again. “Where is the car you came in?” he demanded.

  “In front of the building,” Michelle said.

  “Are there other men there?”

  She shook her head.

  “If there are, I will kill them. And you,” he warned.

  “There is no one else.”

  Ludwig smiled, his eyebrows rising slightly. “We shall see,” he said. He nodded toward the bodies behind him. “One of them has the keys?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Good,” he said, his voice almost a purr. “Go and get them!” he snapped.

  Ludwig stood quietly, watching with obvious pleasure as Michelle moved reluctantly toward the bodies, and began searching the pockets of one of the men. Her face was a mixture of revulsion and horror, and the sight of it gave him a sense of delight. When she turned to face him, keys in hand, his eyes were glittering. His pleasure seemed almost sexual, she suddenly thought.

  The call came into Bugayev’s office at three, as he was finishing a report for Moscow Center on the assassination of the South American drug boss.

  “Bugayev, my old friend. Are you still as ugly as I remember you?” the caller began.

  He recognized the voice immediately, could almost visualize the self-satisfied sneer he had not seen in ten years.

  “Ernst, my good friend,” Bugayev responded, keeping his voice light and friendly. “You sound as though you must be standing before a mirror, as you so often did in the old days. Tell me, did you ever have that nasty scar repaired? The one that swine—oh, what was his name, now? Oh, yes. Alex Moran. The one he gave you so long ago. It must have been so upsetting to all your women. You were such a handsome man in those days
.”

  There was silence on the other end of the line, then, finally, soft laughter. Bugayev thought it sounded forced.

  “It is my good friend Alex I am calling about,” Ludwig said. “I have something he will want. The Cabarini woman. I would like you to get a message to him.”

  “But how would I know where to reach him?” Bugayev asked. “And how would I know what I was telling him was the truth? You always had a nasty habit of lying to me, Ernst.”

  “Would you prefer I just kill her and send you her body for delivery instead?” Ludwig asked.

  He sounded confident, almost playfully so, and it immediately angered Bugayev that he had not killed the man long ago.

  “Ernst.” He made a clucking sound. “If you want to kill her, it doesn’t concern me. After all, one less Capitalist in the world, what would it matter? And I also know you have already decided if she will live or die. Whatever I do will have no effect on anything.”

  “Just do it, my fat, ugly little friend. I don’t think Moran would forgive you if another of his sleeping partners died because of what you did, or didn’t do.” He laughed. “And he seems to have developed an unpleasant disposition these days, hasn’t he?”

  Bugayev let out a heavy sigh for Ludwig’s benefit. He wanted to give Alex options, an excuse for delay if he chose to use it.

  “I will see what I can do,” Bugayev said. “But I can promise nothing.”

  “The woman will die at seven o’clock if he does not call this number at exactly six-forty-five,” Ludwig said. He rattled off the number.

  He is too clever, Bugayev thought. He allows no leeway. But perhaps this time he has miscalculated.

  “I will be happy to oblige you, Ernst,” he said. “Oh, and Ernst, you should know that things are much the same as they were ten years ago. Only perhaps a bit worse this time. This time Alex Moran is hunting you with the Pisani faction and the KGB. I only hope I can be there when you die, Ernst. It would give me so much pleasure.”