It was only later that I understood. A killer is not just someone who lies on a roof with a 12.7mm sniper rifle, waiting for his prey to walk out of a restaurant. Sometimes it is necessary to be inside that restaurant. To pin down your target, you have to get close to him. You have to wear the right clothes, walk in the right way, demand a good table in a restaurant, understand the food and the wine. How could a boy from a poor Russian village have been able to do any of these things if he had not been taught? I have been to art auctions, to operas, to fashion shows and to horse races. I have sipped champagne with bankers, professors, designers and multimillionaires. I have always felt comfortable and nobody has ever thought I was out of place. For this, I have the Countess to thank.
The toughest part of the day came after lunch. The afternoons were devoted to hand-to-hand combat and three-hour classes were taken either by the headmaster, Mr Nye, or a Japanese instructor, Hatsumi Saburo. We all called him HS and he was an extraordinary man. He must have been seventy years old but he moved faster than a teenager, certainly faster than me. If you weren’t concentrating, he would knock you down so hard and so fast that you simply wouldn’t be aware of what had happened until you were on the floor, and he would be standing above you, gazing at the ceiling, as if it had been nothing to do with him. Sefton Nye taught judo and karate but it was Hatsumi Saburo who introduced me to a third martial art, ninjutsu, and it is this that has always stayed with me.
Ninjutsu was the fighting method developed by the ninjas, the spies and the assassins who roamed across Japan in the fifteenth century. It was taught to them by the priests and the warriors who were in hiding in the mountains. What I learned from HS over the next five months was what I can only describe as a total fighting system that encompassed every part of my body including my feet, my knees, my elbows, my fists, my head, even my teeth. And it was more than that. He used to talk about nagare, the flow of technique… knowing when to move from one form of attack to the next. Ultimately, everything came down to mental attitude. “You cannot win if you do not believe you will win,” he once said to me. He had a very heavy Japanese accent and barked like a dog. “You must control your emotions. You must control your feelings. If there is any fear or insecurity, you must destroy it before it destroys you. It is not the size or the strength of your opponent that matters. These can be measured. It is what cannot be measured… courage, determination… that count.”
I felt great reverence for Hatsumi Saburo but I did not like him. Sometimes we would fight each other with wooden swords that were known as bokken. He never held back. When I went to bed, my whole body would be black and blue, while I would never so much as touch him. “You have too many emotions, Yas-sen!” he would crow, as he stood over me. “All that sadness. All that anger. It is the smoke that gets into your eyes. If you do not blow it away how can you hope to see?”
Was I sad about what had happened to me? Was I angry? I suppose Scorpia would know better than me because, just as Mrs Rothman had promised, I was given regular psychological examinations by a doctor called Karl Steiner who came from South Africa. I disliked him from the start; the way he looked at me, his eyes always boring into mine as if he suspected that everything I said was a lie. I don’t think I ever heard Dr Steiner say anything that wasn’t a question. He was a very neat man, always dressed in a suit with a carnation in his lapel. He would sit there with one leg crossed over the other, occasionally glancing at a gold pocket watch to check the time. His office was completely bare… just a white space with two armchairs. It had a window that looked out over the firing range and I would sometimes hear the crack of the rifles outside as he fired his own questions my way.
I regretted now that I had told Mrs Rothman so much about myself. She had passed all the information to him and he wanted me to talk about my parents, my grandmother, my childhood in Estrov. The more we talked, the less I wanted to say. I felt empty, as if the life I was describing was something that no longer belonged to me. And the strange thing is, I think that was exactly what he wanted. In his own way he was just like Hatsumi Saburo. My old life was smoke. It had to be blown away.
We were given a couple of hours of rest before dinner but we were always expected to use the time productively. My tutor, Oliver d’Arc, insisted that I read books… and in English, not Russian. Some evenings we had political discussions. I learned more about my own country while I was on the island than I had the whole time I was living there.
We also had guest lecturers. They were brought to Malagosto in blindfolds and many of them had been in prison but they were all experts in their own field. One was a pickpocket… he shook hands with each one of us before he began and then started his lecture by returning our watches. Another showed us how to pick locks. There was one really brilliant lecture by an elderly Hungarian man with terrible scars down the side of his face. He had lost his sight in a car accident. He talked to us for two hours about disguise and false identities, and then revealed that he was actually a thirty-two-year-old Belgian woman and that she could see as well as any of us.
You never knew what was going to happen. The school loved to throw surprises our way. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, a whistle would blow and we would find ourselves called out to the assault course, crawling through the rain and the mud, climbing nets and swinging on ropes while Mr Ross fired live ammunition at our heels. Once, we were told to swim to the mainland, to steal clothes and money when we got there and then to make our own way back.
But Scorpia did not want us to become too cut off, too removed from the real world. As well as the expeditions with the Countess, they often gave us half a day off to visit Venice. Marat and Sam kept themselves to themselves so I usually found myself with Colette. We would go to the markets together and walk the streets. She was always stopping to take photographs. She loved little details… an iron door handle, a gargoyle, a cat asleep on a windowsill. I had never been out with a girl before – I had never really had the chance – and I found myself being drawn to her in a way I could not completely understand. All the time, I was being taught to hide my feelings. When I was with her, I wanted to do the opposite.
She never told me much more about herself than she had that first time we had met and I was sensible enough not to ask. She let slip that she had once lived in Paris, that her father was something to do with the French government and that she hadn’t spoken to him for years. She had left home when she was very young and had somehow survived on her own since then. She never explained how she had found out about Scorpia. But I did learn that her training would be over very soon. Like all recruits, she was going to be sent on her first solo kill – a real job with a real target.
“Do you ever think about it?” I asked her.
We were sitting outside a café on the Riva degli Schiavoni with a great expanse of water in front of us and hundreds of tourists streaming past. They gave us privacy.
“What?” she asked.
I lowered my voice. “Killing. Taking another person’s life.”
She looked at me over the top of her coffee. She was wearing sunglasses which hid her eyes but I could tell she was annoyed. “You should ask Dr Steiner about that.”
I held her gaze. “I’m asking you.”
“Why do you even want to know?” she snapped. She stirred the coffee. It was very black, served in a tiny cup. “It’s a job. There are all sorts of people who don’t deserve to live. Rich people. Powerful people. Take one of them out, maybe you’re doing the world a favour.”