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complain. For much of her life she had played a dangerous game. She knew the risks. She, too, had sent out killers in her time. Still, it seemed less than fair. That life was behind her now. She had been to confession. She had given away millions. She had walked away from millions more.
    Nor might God have been pleased that, at the moment of imminent death, she committed the sin of vanity. It was true. She would never tell her priest about it because, even as he gave her absolution he would bring a hand to his face so that she could not see him laugh. For at one point, for one of those seconds, what had seemed foremost in her mind was a concern for the appearance of her corpse. She saw a vision of herself as the police would find her: face bloodied, eyes staring at nothing, mouth gaping, hair dripping and matted, her body in an indecorous sprawl, legs apart, across the backseat of the Mercedes. They would take photographs. And so, even as Russo threw her backward and the car began to roll, she had curled up like a fetus and was struggling to hold her long leather skirt against her calves.
    But most of all, she'd thought of Lesko. And whether he would come to see her body. And if he did, would he be sorry that he had hurt her.
    And that, Elena knew full well, was the greatest absurdity of all. It was ludicrous. About to meet her maker and yet mooning like a schoolgirl over this great beast of a man who, two years earlier, would happily have seen her in prison and had himself come within a whisper of killing her.
    It had happened in New York. Brooklyn. The back room of an abandoned barbershop on a street of gutted tenements. He was still a policeman then. He'd come with a shotgun in one hand, a pistol in the other and vengeance in his heart. He left death all around her. Yet, in the end, he could not pull his trigger that one last time. He'd left her standing there.
    Josef had once remarked that she was born again that day. But she knew it was nothing of the sort. A time simply comes when enough is enough. She'd stood there, trembling, long after Lesko had turned away from her and had gone. Then, composing herself, she'd stepped over the bodies of the men he slaughtered, walked out onto the dead street of a dying city, and never again looked back. She would not retum to Bolivia. There was no reason. The last of her relatives, on her mother's side, were dead. Her house had been bombed in the drug wars, the servants frightened away. Her only home was a hotel suite in La Paz.
    Nor could she have remained in the United States. There were two warrants for her arrest, one from the federal government, the other from the state of New York as a material witness to that so-called barbershop massacre that had filled the front pages of the city's newspapers.
    But there was still Switzerland. Where her money was. Where her second family was—that of the Swiss father she had never been permitted to meet until, at age twenty, she telephoned him herself, then met him in Zurich soon after. He, too, was dead now. He had died in the same climbing accident that had crippled Uncle Urs. But Uncle Urs, no less formidable for being confined to a wheelchair, no less the head of the family, had now become her protector. And there were aunts, nephews, and many cousins. All of them welcomed her. Loved her. She felt alive again. Her past, her mistakes, were behind her. All of it. Except for Lesko.
    In the two years since the barbershop he was never far from her thoughts. Not for a day. The priest had tried to explain it. This man, the priest said, this policeman, was the instrument of your salvation. Granted, this was not his intention. But your life did tum on your encounter with him. It is perfectly natural to feel certain emotions toward those who have importantly touched our lives.
    “Certain emotions?” she asked softly. “The man despises me.”
    “And you wish he did not?”
    “Yes.”
    “This too seems natural. If he was the instrument of