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.