Gessler sipped his tea. Peterson could not see this but could hear it in the sensitive microphone used to amplify the old man’s weak voice.

“But I digress,” Gessler said, as his teacup rattled back into the saucer. “Back to the business at hand. It seems we have another complication concerning the Rolfe matter.”

“DOES this fellow strike you as the kind of man who will let the matter drop?” Gessler said when Peterson was finished with his briefing.

“No, Herr Gessler.”

“Then what do you suggest?”

“That we clean up the mess as quickly as possible and make certain there’s nothing for him to find.”

Gessler sighed. “It was never the purpose of this body to engage in violence-only to combat the violence that is being done to us.”

“In war there are casualties.”

“Surveillance and intimidation is one thing-killing is quite another. It’s critical we use someone who can’t be linked to the Council in any way. Surely, in your other line of work, you’ve come across people like this.”

“I have.”

The old man sighed.

Gerhardt Peterson pulled out the earpiece and headed back to Zurich.

7

THERE WAS an old joke on Corsica that the island’s notoriously treacherous roads had been designed jointly by Machiavelli and the Marquis de Sade. Yet the Englishman had never minded driving there. Indeed, he tore around the island with a certain fatalistic abandon that had earned him the reputation of being something of a madman. At the moment he was racing along a windswept highway on the western edge of the island through a thick blanket of marine fog. Five miles on, he turned inland. As he climbed into the hills, the fog gave way to a clear blue afternoon sky. The autumn sunlight brought out the contrasting shades of green in the olive trees and Laricio pine. In the shadow of the trees were dense patches of gorse and brier and rockrose, the legendary Corsican undergrowth known as the macchia that had concealed bandits and murderers for centuries. The Englishman lowered his window. The warm scent of rosemary washed over his face.

Ahead of him stood a hill town, a cluster of sand-colored houses with red-tile roofs huddled around a bell tower, half in shadow, half in brilliant sunlight. In the background rose the mountains, ice-blue snow on the highest peaks. Ten years ago, when he had first settled here, the children would point at him with their index fingers and pinkies, the Corsican way of warding off the evil eye of a stranger. Now they smiled and waved as he sped through the town and headed up the cul-de-sac valley toward his villa.

Along the way he passed a paesanu working a small patch of vegetables at the roadside. The man peered at the Englishman, black eyes smoldering beneath the brim of his broad hat, and signaled his recognition with an almost imperceptible wave of his first two fingers. The old paesanu was one of the Englishman’s adopted clansmen. Farther up the road, a young boy called Giancomo stepped into his path and waved his arms for the Englishman to stop.

“Welcome home. Was your trip good?”

“Very good.”

“What did you bring me?”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“On whether you watched my villa for me while I was away.”

“Of course I did, just as I promised.”

“Did anyone come?”

“No, I saw no one.”

“You’re quite sure?”

The boy nodded. From his suitcase the Englishman removed a beautiful satchel, handmade of fine Spanish leather, and handed it to the boy. “For your books-so you won’t lose them on the way home from school anymore.”

The boy pulled the satchel to his nose and smelled the new leather. Then he said: “Do you have any cigarettes?”

“You won’t tell your mother?”

“Of course not!”

The men pretended to rule Corsica, but the real power lay in the hands of the mothers. The Englishman handed the boy a half-empty packet.

He slipped the cigarettes into his satchel. “One more thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Don Orsati wishes to speak with you.”

“When did you see him?”

“This morning.”

“Where?”

“At the café in the village.”

“Where is he now?”

“At the café in the village.”

Orsati lives a stressful life, thought the Englishman.

“Invite the don to my villa for lunch. But tell him that if he expects to eat, he should bring along some food.”

The boy smiled and scampered off, the leather satchel flailing behind him like a banner. The Englishman slipped the jeep into gear and continued up the road. About a half mile from his villa, he slammed on his brakes, and the jeep skidded to a stop amid a cloud of red dust.

Standing in the center of the narrow track was a large male goat. He had the markings of a palomino and a red beard. Like the Englishman, he was scarred from old battles. The goat detested the Englishman and blocked the road to his villa whenever it pleased him. The Englishman had dreamed many times of ending the conflict once and for all with the Glock pistol he kept in his glove box. But the beast belonged to Don Casabianca, and if he were ever harmed there would be a feud.

The Englishman honked his horn. Don Casabianca’s goat threw back his head and glared at him defiantly. The Englishman had two choices, both unpleasant. He could wait out the goat, or he could try to move him.

He took a long look over his shoulder to make sure no one was watching. Then he threw open his door and charged the goat, waving his hands and screaming like a lunatic, until the beast gave ground and darted into the shelter of the macchia. A fitting place for him, thought the Englishman-the macchia, the place where all thieves and bandits eventually reside.

He got back into his jeep and headed up the road to his villa, thinking about the terrible shame of it. A highly accomplished assassin, yet he couldn’t get to his own home without first suffering a humiliation at the hands of Don Casabianca’s wretched goat.

IThad never taken much to spark a feud on Corsica. An insult. An accusation of cheating in the marketplace. Dissolution of an engagement. The pregnancy of an unmarried woman. Once, in the Englishman’s village, there had been a forty-year feud over the keys to the church. After the initial spark, unrest quickly followed. An ox would be killed. The owner of the ox would retaliate by killing a mule or a flock of sheep. A prized olive tree would be chopped down. A fence toppled. A house would burn. Then the murders would start. And on it would go, sometimes for a generation or more, until the aggrieved parties had settled their differences or given up the fight in exhaustion.

On Corsica most men were all too willing to do their killing themselves. But there were always some who needed others to do the blood work for them: notables who were too squeamish to get their hands dirty or unwilling to risk arrest or exile; women who could not kill for themselves or had no male kin to do the deed on their behalf. People like these relied on professionals: the taddunaghiu. Usually they turned to the Orsati clan.

The Orsatis had fine land with many olive trees, and their oil was regarded as the sweetest in all of Corsica. But they did more than produce fine olive oil. No one knew how many Corsicans had died at the hands of Orsati assassins over the ages-least of all the Orsatis themselves-but local lore placed the number in the thousands. It might have been significantly higher if not for the clan’s rigorous vetting process. In the old days, the Orsatis operated by a strict code. They refused to carry out a killing unless satisfied that the party before them had indeed been wronged and blood vengeance was required.