Now, though, now I feel bad for the first time in ten years, a gnawing discomfort in the knowledge of what I’ve done. Call it conscience, if you will; all I know is that it’s a sadness for which I’m profoundly grateful, no less than if my sight had been restored to me after years of blindness. What overtook me yesterday was a longing to be the person I once was.
I’ve already changed, and I swear Klemperer is the last man I’ll kill for money. I can’t promise not to kill again, not yet—I wish I could, but I’ve thought it through endlessly over the last twenty-four hours, and of necessity there are still four more murders I have to commit, four more deaths that lie between me and the person I was on the day you died. Of course, in many respects, I’ll never be that person again, but this is my opportunity to at least end the sickness.
If there were another way, if I could start afresh without killing another person, I’d take that path, because I see now what I always should have seen, that it’s what you would have wanted me to do, what we would have wanted. As it is, four more deaths will count for nothing in the context of what I’ve done—they’ll bear no more significance than the burning of this letter a few minutes from now.
What matters, surely, is that I’ve written this letter! The process has started, and there’ll be no turning back. In some perverse way, I did the things I did in the last ten years because I lost you. Perhaps you’ll think it equally perverse, but these final four killings, everything I’m about to do, it’s all because I loved you, because I still love you, and because I always will.
Conrad
1
The snow had smothered the town, not with the deep drifts that would come and go through the Bavarian winter, but enough to give the evening a sense of enclosed stillness. Between snow and lights there was a comforting glow around the houses. Even Frank’s house, a brutal 1970s chalet that Conrad had never liked, looked picturesque in its winter clothes.
Yet as soon as he got out of the car, Conrad was drawn from the houses around him to the half-hidden view of the mountain above, its trees and slopes and outcrops all dusted in shadowy blue light. The cable car station was lost in the clouds and the dense thickets of lazily falling snow, but the knowledge that it was up there was soothing, maybe for no other reason than that it reminded him of the distant past, a time when he might still have been able to turn back, before the irreparable damage had been done.
For a minute or two he didn’t want to move and surrender this peace. He didn’t want to spend time with Frank and he didn’t want the dream of the last two weeks to be snatched away from him, for Frank to tell him that he’d miscalculated, that escaping this business would not be so easy.
He’d been a ghost, that was the fact at the center of his plans, a fact that he’d convinced himself of, and as long as he stood out there in the clean coldness of early evening, he could hold onto it and believe it true. The trouble was, he’d remain a ghost unless he confronted whatever alternate truth Frank might have to offer him.
Even if there were more than four, even if every crime boss and police force in Europe knew about him, he needed to hear it. He liked the cool simplicity of killing his way out of the business, but if the facts suggested that it would be impossible, he was still determined to find another way, whatever it took.
He followed the vague line of the path that was still showing through the snow and knocked on the door. Frank opened it almost immediately, took the briefest moment to place him, and then beamed a smile, pointing at Conrad with both hands like they’d once been in a band together.
“Hey, man! This is unexpected,” he said in his West Coast surfer accent.
He almost felt sorry for Frank. He was over fifty now, his stockiness running to fat a little, but he was squeezed into clothes designed for skinny kids half his age, and his short hair was dyed a yellowy blond, a high-maintenance operation that only served to make him look even older than he was. He could imagine Frank being offended by every deeply etched line in his own perma-tanned face, like they were all personal betrayals.
“Good to see you, Frank.”
As if double-checking against his own knowledge, Frank said, “You’re not on a job?”
Conrad laughed. “Did you send me on a job?” Frank shrugged and looked scatterbrained, a goofy act he’d perfected over the years, one that belied the dangerous truth, the early years in some elite U.S. Army regiment, the two decades as one of the operational hubs around which Eberhardt’s criminal empire revolved. “I’ve been away for a couple of days, thought I’d call in—I need to pick your brain about something.”
There was that look again, hinting that there wasn’t much to pick, but he stepped back and said, “Come on in. You hungry?”
“No, thanks,” said Conrad as Frank shut the door behind him. He walked into the sitting room, took his coat off, and put it on one of the sofas.
“Port wine?”