Russian Roulette (20 page)

Morning lessons took place in the classrooms. We learned about guns and knives, how to create a booby trap, how to make a bomb using seven different ingredients that you could find in any supermarket. There was one teacher—he was redheaded, scrawny, with tattoos all over his upper body—who brought in a different weapon for us to practice with every day: not just guns and knives but swords, throwing spikes, ninja fighting fans, and even a medieval crossbow . . . he actually insisted on firing an apple off Marat’s head. His name was Gordon Ross and he came from a city called Glasgow, in Scotland. He had briefly been assistant to the chief armorer at MI6 until Scorpia had tempted him away at five times his original salary.

The first time we met, I impressed him by stripping down an AK7 machine gun in eighteen seconds. My old friend Leo, of course, would have done it faster. Ross was actually a knife man. His two great heroes were William Fairbairn and Eric Sykes, who had together created the ultimate fighting knife for British commandos during the Second World War. He was an expert with throwing knives and he’d had a set specially designed and weighted for his hand. Put him twenty meters from a target and there wasn’t a student on the island who could beat him for speed or accuracy, even when he was competing against guns.

Ross also had a fascination with gadgets. He didn’t manufacture any himself, but he had made a study of the secret weaponry provided by all the different intelligence services and he had managed to steal several items, which he brought in for us to examine. There was a credit card developed by the CIA. One edge was razor sharp. The French had come up with a string of onions—several of them were grenades. His own employers, MI6, had provided an antiseptic cream that could eat through metals, a fountain pen that fired a poisoned nib, and a Power Plus battery that concealed a radio transmitter. You simply gave the whole thing a half twist and it would set off a beacon to summon immediate help. All these devices amused him, but at the end of the day he dismissed them as toys. He preferred his knives.

Weapons and self-defense were only part of my training. I was surprised to find myself going back to school in the old-fashioned sense; I learned math, English, science—even classical music, art, and cooking. Oliver D’Arc took some of these classes. However, I will never forget the day I was introduced to the unsmiling Italian woman who never told anyone her name but called herself the Countess. It may well be that she was a true aristocrat. She certainly behaved like one, insisting that we stand when she entered and always address her as “ma’am.” She was about fifty, exquisitely dressed, with expensive jewelry and perfect manners. When she stood up, she expected us to do so too. The Countess took us shopping and to art galleries in Venice. She made us read newspapers and celebrity magazines and often talked about the people in the photographs. At first, I had absolutely no idea what she was doing on the island.

It was only later that I understood. A killer is not just someone who lies on a roof with a 12.7mm sniper rifle, waiting for his prey to walk out of a restaurant. Sometimes it is necessary to be inside that restaurant. To pin down your target, you have to get close to him. You have to wear the right clothes, walk in the right way, demand a good table, understand the food and the wine. Do you think a boy from a poor Russian village would have been able to do any of these things if he had not been taught? I have been to art auctions, to operas, to fashion shows, and to horse races. I have sipped champagne with bankers, professors, designers, and multimillionaires. I have always felt comfortable and nobody has ever thought I was out of place. For this, I have the Countess to thank.

The toughest part of the day came after lunch. The afternoons were devoted to hand-to-hand combat, and three-hour classes were taught either by the headmaster, Mr. Nye, or a Japanese instructor, Hatsumi Saburo. We all called him HS and he was an extraordinary man. He must have been seventy years old, but he moved faster than a teenager, certainly faster than I did. If you weren’t concentrating, he would knock you down so hard and so fast that you simply wouldn’t be aware of what had happened until you were on the floor and he was standing above you, gazing at the ceiling, as if it had been nothing to do with him. Desmond Nye taught judo and karate, but it was Hatsumi Saburo who introduced me to a third martial art,
ninjutsu,
and it is this that has always stayed with me.

Ninjutsu
was the fighting method developed by the ninjas, the spies, and the assassins who roamed across Japan in the fifteenth century. It was taught to them by the priests and the warriors who were in hiding in the mountains. What I learned from HS over the next five months was what I can only describe as a total fighting system that encompassed every part of my body, including my feet, my knees, my elbows, my fists, my head, even my teeth. And it was more than that. He used to talk about
nagare,
the flow of technique: knowing when to move from one form of attack to the next. At the end of the day, everything came down to mental attitude. “You cannot win if you do not believe you will win,” he once said to me. He had a very heavy Japanese accent and barked like a dog. “You must control your emotions. You must control your feelings. If there is any fear or insecurity, you must destroy it before it destroys you. It is not the size or the strength of your opponent that matters. These can be measured. It is what cannot be measured . . . courage, determination . . . that count.”

I felt great reverence for Hatsumi Saburo, but I did not like him. Sometimes we would fight each other with wooden swords that were known as
boken.
He never held back. When I went to bed that night, my whole body would be black and blue while I had never so much as touched him. “You have too many emotions, Yass-sen!” he would crow as he stood over me. “All that sadness. All that anger. It is the smoke that gets into your eyes. If you do not blow it away, how can you hope to see?”

Was I sad about what had happened to me? Was I angry? I suppose Scorpia would know better than me because, just as Mrs. Rothman had promised, I was given regular psychological examinations by a doctor named Karl Steiner, who, despite his name, actually came from South Africa. I disliked him from the start, the way he looked at me, his eyes always boring into mine as if he suspected that everything I said was a lie. I don’t think I ever heard Dr. Steiner say anything that wasn’t a question. He was a very neat man, always dressed in a suit with a carnation in his lapel. He would sit there with one leg crossed over the other, occasionally glancing at a gold pocket watch to check on the time. His office was completely bare . . . just a white space with two armchairs. It had a window that looked out over the firing range and I would sometimes hear the crack of the rifles outside as he fired his own questions my way.

I regretted now that I had told Julia Rothman so much about myself. She had passed all the information to him and he wanted me to talk about my parents, my grandmother, my childhood in Estrov. The more we talked, the less I wanted to say. I felt empty, as if the life I was describing was something that no longer belonged to me. And the strange thing is, I think that was exactly what he wanted. In his own way he was exactly like Hatsumi Saburo. My old life was smoke. It had to be blown away.

We were given a couple of hours’ rest before dinner, but we were always expected to use the time productively. My tutor, Oliver, insisted that I read books . . . and in English, not Russian. Some evenings we had political discussions. I learned more about my own country while I was on the island than I had the whole time I was living there.

We also had guest lecturers. They were brought to Malagosto in blindfolds and many of them had been in prison, but they were all experts in their own fields. One was a pickpocket—he shook hands with each one of us before he began and then started his lecture by returning our watches. Another showed us how to pick locks. There was one really brilliant lecture by an elderly Hungarian man with terrible scars down the side of his face. He had lost his sight in a car accident. He talked to us for two hours about disguise and false identities, and then revealed that he was actually a thirty-two-year-old Belgian woman and could see as well as any of us.

You never knew what was going to happen. The school loved to throw surprises our way. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, a whistle would blow and we would find ourselves called out to the assault course, crawling through the rain and the mud, climbing nets, and swinging on ropes while Mr. Ross fired live ammunition at our heels. Once, we were told to swim to the mainland, to steal clothes and money when we got there, and then to make our own way back.

Scorpia did not want us to become too cut off, too removed from the real world. As well as the expeditions with the Countess, they often gave us half a day off to visit Venice. Marat and Sam kept themselves to themselves, so I usually found myself with Colette. We would go to the markets together and walk the streets. She was always stopping to take photographs. She loved little details . . . an iron door handle, a gargoyle, a cat asleep on a windowsill. I had never been out with a girl before—I had never really had the chance—and I found myself being drawn to her in a way I could not completely understand. All the time, I was being taught to hide my feelings. When I was with her, I wanted to do the opposite.

She never told me very much about herself other than what she had that first time we had met, and I was sensible enough not to ask. She did let slip that she had once lived in Paris, that her father was something to do with the French government, and that she hadn’t spoken to him for years. She had left home when she was very young and had somehow survived on her own since then. She never explained how she had found out about Scorpia. But I did learn that her training would be over very soon. Like all recruits, she was going to be sent on her first solo kill—a real job with a real target.

“Do you ever think about it?” I asked her.

We were sitting outside a café on the Riva degli Schiavoni with a great expanse of water in front of us and hundreds of tourists streaming past. They gave us privacy.

“What?” she asked.

I lowered my voice. “Killing. Taking another person’s life.”

She looked at me over the top of her coffee. She was wearing sunglasses that hid her eyes, but I could tell she was annoyed. “You should ask Dr. Steiner about that.”

I held her gaze. “I’m asking you.”

“Why do you even want to know?” she snapped. She stirred the coffee. It was very black, served in a tiny cup. “It’s a job. There are all sorts of people who don’t deserve to live. Rich people. Powerful people. Take one of them out, maybe you’re doing the world a favor.”

“What if they’re married?”

“Who cares?”

“What if they have children?”

“If you think like that, you shouldn’t be here. You shouldn’t even be talking like this. If you were to say any of this to Marat or Sam, they’d go straight to Mr. Nye.”

“I wouldn’t talk to them,” I said. “They’re not my friends.”

“And you think I am?”

I still remember that moment. Colette was leaning toward me and she was wearing a jacket with a very soft, close-fitting jersey beneath. She unhooked her sunglasses and looked at me with brown eyes that, I’m sure, had more warmth in them than she intended. Right then, I wished that we could just be like all the other people streaming past us, a Russian boy and a French girl who had just happened to bump into each other in one of the most romantic places on the earth. But of course it couldn’t be. It would never be.

“I’m not your friend,” she said. “We’ll never have friends, Yassen. Either of us.”

She finished her coffee, stood up, and walked away.

• • •

Colette left a few weeks later, and after that there were just the three of us continuing with the training, day and night.

None of the instructors ever said as much, but I knew I was doing well. I was the fastest across the assault course. On the shooting range, my targets always came whirring back with the bullets grouped neatly inside the head. I had mastered all sixteen body strikes—the so-called “secret fists”—that are essential to
ninjutsu
, and in one memorable training session I even managed to land a blow on Hatsumi Saburo. I could see the old man was pleased . . . although he flattened me half a second later. After hours in the gym, I was in peak physical condition. I could run five times around the island and I wouldn’t be out of breath.

And yet I couldn’t forget what I had talked about with Colette. When I fired at a target, I would always imagine a real human being and not the cutout soldier with his blank, snarling face in front of me. Instead of the quick snap, the little round hole that appeared in the paper as the bullet passed through, there would be the explosion of bone fragmenting, blood splashing out. The paper soldier’s eyes ignored me. He felt nothing. But what would a man be thinking as he died? He would never see his wife again. He would never feel the warmth of the sun. Everything that he had and everything he was would have been stolen away by me. Could I really do that to someone and not hate myself forever?

I had not chosen this. There was a time when I’d thought I was going to work in a factory making pesticides. I was going to live in a village that nobody had ever heard of, dreaming of being a helicopter pilot, pinning pictures to the wall. Looking back, it felt as if some evil force had been manipulating me every inch of the way to bring me here. From the moment my parents had been killed, my own life had no longer been mine to control. And yet, it occurred to me, it was still not too late. Scorpia had taught me how to fight, how to change my identity, how to hide, and how to survive. Once I left Malagosto, I could use these skills to escape from them. I could steal money and go anywhere in the world that I wanted, change my name, begin a new life. Lying in bed at night, I would think about this, but at the same time I knew, with a sense of despair, that I was wrong. Scorpia was too powerful. No matter how far I ran, eventually they would find me and there was no escaping what the result would be. I would die young. But wasn’t that better than becoming what they wanted? At least I would have stayed true to myself.