Ninety
What do you not drive human hearts into, cursed Craving for gold!
Virgil – The Aeneid (iii.56)
Pont de Grenelle, 16th Arrondissement, Paris 16th July – 9:05pm
They were late.
They’d said quarter to and it was already five past. It made him uneasy to be standing out in the open for this long. If they weren’t there in the next five minutes he was leaving, a million dollars or not.
He patted his pocket nervously. It was still there; he could feel it through the black woollen material, its warm weight pressing against his thigh. It was still safe.
A teenage couple, arms interlinked, strolled towards him, snatching kisses every few steps in the dying light. Mid-embrace, the girl caught sight of him and broke away with an embarrassed shrug. Her fingers flew unconsciously to the small silver crucifix that hung around her neck.
‘Bonsoir, mon père.’
‘Bonsoir, mon enfant.’
He smiled and nodded at them both as they walked past him to the other side of the Pont de Grenelle, noting that it was only then they allowed their guilty laughter to echo up through the fading heat. Against a crimson sky, the lights on the Eiffel Tower sparkled as if it was on fire.
He rested his arms on the parapet and looked out at the Statue of Liberty. Identical to her much larger sister across the Atlantic, she dominated the Allée des Cygnes, the narrow island in the middle of the River Seine upon which she had been erected in 1889, according to the inscription on her base. She had her back to him, smooth bronze muscles of crumpled fabric and taut skin, eternally youthful despite the green patina of old age.
As a child, his grandmother had once told him that many members of their family had made the long and difficult journey from Naples to America in the 1920s. When he looked at the statue, he felt somehow connected to those faceless relatives, understood something of their sense of wonder at their first sight of the New World, their unshakeable faith in a new beginning. So he always chose this place. It felt familiar. Safe. Protected. Caso mai. Just in case.
Two men appeared out of the shadows of the bridge below and looked up at him. He sketched a wave, crossed to the other side of the road and made his way down the shallow concrete steps towards them, walking under the bridge’s low steel arch. He stopped at the edge of the wide area encircling the statue’s massive stone pedestal, careful as always to keep about twenty feet between himself and them.
They must have been there all the time, he thought to himself; watching him, checking that he was alone, hiding in the lengthening shadows like lions in long grass. That figured. These were not people to take chances. But then neither was he.
‘Bonsoir,’ the large man on the left called clearly through the night air, his long blond hair melting into a thick beard. An American, he guessed.
‘Bonsoir,’ he called back warily.
A large Bateau Mouche swept down the river past them, its blinding lights reaching into the darkness, probing, feeling. The heavy folds of the statue’s robe seemed to ripple and lift gently under their touch as if caught in some unseen draught. As if she was teasing them.
‘You got it?’ The bearded man called out in English when the throb of the ship’s engines had faded and the burning lights had shifted their relentless glare further along the bank.
‘You got the money?’ His voice was firm. It was the usual game, played out more times than he cared to remember. He looked down, feigning indifference and noticed that his polished black shoes were already dusty from the dry gravel.
‘Let’s see it first,’ the man called back.
He paused. There seemed to be something strange about the bearded man’s voice. A slight tension. He looked up and checked over his shoulder but his escape route was clear. He blinked his concern away and gave them the standard response.
‘Show me the money and I’ll take you to it.’
There. He saw it this time. Most wouldn’t have noticed but he had been around long enough to read the signs. The stiffening of the shoulders, the narrowing of the eyes as the lone antelope strayed just that little too far from the rest of the herd.
They were preparing themselves.
He looked around again. It was still clear, although it was difficult to see beyond the trees as night closed in. Then he realized. That’s why they’d been late.
So it would be dark.
Without saying a word he spun on the gravel, running, running as fast as he could, his slick leather soles spraying stones behind him like tyres accelerating on a dirt track. He couldn’t let them get it. He couldn’t let them find it. He snatched a glance over his shoulder and saw the two men bearing down on him, a gun barrel glimmering in the orange glow of the lights that lined the bridge overhead like a sharp claw.
Instinctively, he snapped his head back round just as he ran onto the point of the knife. Now he understood. The dark shape that had appeared in front of him, arm outstretched, face masked by the night, had been hiding in the shadows until he had come within striking distance. He’d been herded into the arms of death like an animal.
With a short, sharp punch, the six-inch serrated blade carved up into his chest and the shock of the impact made him swallow hard. He felt its coldness slicing through the soft cartilage at the base of his sternum, cutting into his heart.
It was the last thing he felt.
In the orange light, the blood that had leaked over the starched whiteness of his dog collar glowed green as Lady Liberty’s weathered skin. But unknowing, unseeing, unfeeling, her steady gaze was fixed instead towards America.
Towards New York.
Gold conjures up a mist about a man, more destructive of all his old senses and lulling to his feelings than
