A Foreign Country (22 page)

‘Over here,’ said Arnaud, seated at the bar beneath a collage of photographs of Marseille footballers, past and present. On a facing wall were pictures of Lilian Thuram, Patrick Vieira and Zinedine Zidane, clutching the 1998 World Cup; next to this, a framed cartoon of Nicolas Sarkozy in exaggeratedly stacked heels, his eyes scratched out by a knife, a biro-drawn phallus swelling from his trousers. Arnaud stood up. He was a tall, well-built man, at least seventeen stone. Wordlessly, he ushered Kell to a formica table at the back of the café. The table was positioned beneath a television that had been bolted to the wall. They shook hands over an ashtray swollen with gum and cigarettes and sat on opposite chairs. Arnaud’s palm was dry and soft, his face entirely without kindness but not lacking a certain nobility. With his dark, indifferent eyes, he looked for all the world like an exiled despot of the Amin school. It made sense. Arnaud was probably losing face by talking to Kell but had calculated that a thousand euros for a ten-minute conversation was a price well worth paying.

‘So you are journalist?’

‘That’s right.’

Arnaud didn’t ask what paper. They were speaking in French, his accent as difficult to unpick as any Kell could remember. ‘And you want to know about someone?’

Kell nodded. Somebody had switched on the television and his reply was partly smothered by the commentary on a game of basketball. Perhaps Arnaud had ordered this so that they might speak in confidence; perhaps it was the manager’s way of expressing his disapproval.

‘This morning, at the ferry terminal, you picked up a man in his early thirties off the boat from Tunis.’

Arnaud nodded, though it wasn’t clear whether or not he remembered. He was wearing a button-down denim shirt and removed a packet of full-strength Winston from the breast pocket.

‘Smoke?’

‘Sure,’ said Kell, and took one.

There was a pause while Arnaud lit their cigarettes – his own first. Then he leaned forward.

‘You feeling nervous in this place? You look nervous.’

‘Do I?’ Kell knew that he didn’t and that Arnaud was trying to wind him up. ‘Funny. I was just reflecting on what a civilized place this is.’

‘Huh?’

Kell looked back at the bar. There was a half-eaten plate of spaghetti on the next-door table, two old men playing backgammon by the door. ‘You can get an espresso. You can smoke. The food smells good.’ He made a point of looking directly into Arnaud’s eyes, so that he wouldn’t have to waste time playing any more of his games. ‘I’m used to places where you can’t drink alcohol, where they don’t allow women to sit with men. I’m used to roadside bombs and snipers lining the white man up for breakfast. I get nervous in places like Baghdad, Arnaud. I get nervous in Kabul. Do you follow?’

The despot shifted in his chair, the plastic squeaking.

‘I remember this guy.’ It took Kell a moment to realize that the driver was talking about Malot.

‘I thought you might. Can you tell me where you drove him?’

Arnaud blew a cloud of smoke past Kell’s ear. ‘That’s it? That’s all you want to know?’

‘That’s all I want to know.’

He frowned, the tops of his soft black cheeks tightening under the eyes. A mixed-race boy, not much older than fifteen or sixteen, came to the table and asked Kell if he wanted a drink.

‘Nothing for me.’

‘Have something,’ said Arnaud.

Kell took a drag on the cigarette. ‘A beer.’

‘
Un bière
, Pep,’ said Arnaud, as though Kell’s order needed translating. He scratched at something on the side of his neck. ‘It was a long journey, expensive.’

‘How long?’

‘Only got back about two hours ago. We went to Castelnaudary.’

‘Castelnaudary? That’s near Toulouse, right?’

‘Look it up.’

Kell blew the smoke back. ‘Or you could just tell me.’

‘Pay me the money.’

He took an envelope containing the cash from his jeans and passed it across the table.

‘So. For a thousand euros, Arnaud. Where’s Castelnaudary?’

The cab driver smiled, enjoying the game. ‘West of here. Maybe three hours on the autoroute. Past Carcassone.’

‘Cassoulet country,’ Kell replied, thinking of the Languedoc-Roussillon but not expecting much in the way of a reaction. ‘Did you drop him in town? Do you remember the address?’

‘There was no address.’ Arnaud put the envelope in the hip pocket of his chinos and it was as if the weight of the money, the reality of it, jolted him into a greater cooperation. ‘It was strange, in fact. He wanted me to leave him on the outskirts of a village ten kilometres to the south. In a lay-by, in the middle of the countryside. He said that somebody was coming to collect him.’

Kell asked the obvious question. ‘Why didn’t you just take him to where he needed to go?’

‘He said that he didn’t have an address. I didn’t want to argue, I didn’t really care. I had a long drive back to Marseille. I wanted to come home and see my daughter.’

Kell thought about enquiring after Arnaud’s family, to soften him up a bit, but it didn’t feel like a strategy worth pursuing. ‘And what about the rest of the journey? Did you talk on the way? Did he have anything to say to you?’

The African smiled, more broadly now, and Kell saw that his gums were yellowed with age and decay. ‘No, man.’ He shook his head. ‘This guy doesn’t talk. He doesn’t even look. Mostly he sleeps or stares out of the window. Typical racist. Typical French.’

‘You think he was
racist
?’

Arnaud ignored the question and asked one of his own. ‘So who is he? Why is a British newspaper interested in him? Did he steal something? He fuck Princess Kate or something?’

Arnaud laughed heartily at his own joke. Kell wasn’t much of a royalist but refrained from joining in.

‘He’s just somebody we’re interested in. If I had a map, could you show me exactly where you left him?’

Arnaud nodded. Kell waited for him to make a move. They sat in silence until it became clear that Arnaud was holding out for something.

‘Do you
have
a map?’ Kell asked.

Arnaud folded his arms.

‘Why would I have one in here?’ he asked, looking down at the floor. The crust of an old sandwich was hardening beneath a torn leather stool. Kell could not get a signal on his iPhone and had no choice but to stand up and leave the café, again running the gauntlet of track-suited youths and unleashed dogs outside. He found his waiting cab and tapped on the window, waking the driver from a brief sleep. The window came down and Kell asked if he could borrow a road map of France. This simple request was met with almost complete contempt, because it required the driver to step out of the vehicle, to open the boot of his Mercedes and to retrieve the map from the boot.

‘Maybe you should keep it in the car,’ Kell told him, and returned to his table in the café. Arnaud took the map, flicked to the index, found Castelnaudary and pointed to the approximate area where he had left François Malot.

‘Here,’ he said, a dry, nail-chewed finger momentarily obscuring the precise location. Kell took the map and wrote down the name of the village: Salles-sur-l’Hers.

‘And it was a lay-by? In the middle of the countryside?’

Arnaud nodded.

‘Anything distinctive about the area that you can remember? Was there a church nearby? A playground?’

Arnaud shook his head, as though he was becoming bored of the conversation. ‘No. Just some trees, fields. Fucking countryside, you know?’ He said the word ‘countryside’ as if it were also a term of abuse. ‘When I turned around to go home, I remember I went past some recycling bins after maybe one minute, two, so that’s how far I dropped him from Salles-sur-l’Hers.’

‘Thank you,’ Kell replied. He passed the number of the Marquand mobile across the table. ‘If you think of anything else …’

‘I’ll call you.’ Arnaud slid the number into the same shirt pocket in which he kept his cigarettes. The tone of his reply suggested that this would be the last time that Thomas Kell ever saw or heard from him. ‘What happened to your eye? The passenger did this to you?’

‘One of his friends,’ Kell replied, rising from the table. His beer had arrived while he was fetching the map. He left a two-euro coin on the table though he hadn’t touched it. ‘Thanks for agreeing to meet me.’

‘No problem.’ Arnaud did not bother standing up. He shook Kell’s hand and with the other, patted the wad of money in his pocket. ‘I should say thank you to your British newspaper.’ Another yellow-gummed smile. ‘Very generous. Very nice present.’

Back at the hotel, there was a voice message on Kell’s telephone from a petulant-sounding Madeleine Brive. She was sorry to hear about the attack at Cité Radieuse, but seemingly more upset that Stephen Uniacke had not possessed the good grace to call her earlier in the afternoon to warn her that their dinner at Chez Michel would not now be going ahead. As a consequence, she had wasted her one and only night in Marseille.

‘Charming,’ Kell said to the room as he hung up. He wondered if Luc was still listening.

He slept well, as deeply as at any point in the operation, and ate a decent breakfast in the hotel restaurant before checking out and finding an Internet café within a stone’s throw of the Gare Saint-Charles. His laptop was now effectively useless; Luc’s DGSE comrades would almost certainly have fitted it with a tracking device or key logger software. Kell saw that Elsa Cassani had sent a document by email, which he assumed – correctly – was the vetting file on Malot. A message accompanying the document said: ‘Call me if you have any questions x’ and Kell printed it out with the assistance of a hyper-efficient Goth with a piercing in his tongue.

There was a branch of McDonald’s at the station. Kell bought a cup of radioactively hot coffee, found a vacant table, and worked his way through Elsa’s findings.

She had done well, tracing Malot’s secondary school, the college in Toulon where he had studied Information Technology, the name of the gym in Paris of which he was a member. The photograph of Malot sent by Marquand showed two of his colleagues from a software firm in Brest that had been bought out and absorbed by a larger corporation in Paris, at the headquarters of which Malot now worked. Elsa had traced two bank accounts, as well as tax records going back seven years; there were, in her opinion, ‘no anomalies’ in Malot’s financial affairs. He paid his bills on time, had been renting his apartment in the 7th for just over a year, and drove a second-hand Renault Megane that had been purchased in Brittany. As far as friends or girlfriends were concerned, enquiries at his office and gymnasium suggested that François Malot was something of a loner, a private man who kept himself to himself. Elsa had even telephoned Malot’s boss, who informed her that ‘poor François’ was on an extended leave of absence following a family tragedy. As far as she could tell, Malot had no presence on social networks and his emails were regularly downloaded to a host computer that Elsa had not been able to hack. Without the assistance of Cheltenham, it had not been possible to listen to his mobile telephone calls but she had managed to intercept one potentially interesting email exchange between Malot and an individual registered with Wanadoo as ‘Christophe Delestre’ whom she suspected was a friend or relative. Elsa had attached the correspondence to the file.

Kell placed the rest of the documents in his shoulder bag, drained his cup of coffee and sent Elsa a text.

This is all first class. Thank you.

In different circumstances, he might have added one of her kisses – ‘
X
’ – at the end of the message, but he was the boss, and therefore obliged to keep a certain professional distance. He then proceeded to read the Delestre emails. They were in French and dated five days earlier, which placed Malot at the Ramada towards the tail-end of his holiday with Amelia.

From
: [email protected]

To
: [email protected]

When are you coming back to Paris? We miss you. Kitty wants a kiss from her godfather.

Christophe

From
: [email protected]

To
: [email protected]

Enjoying Tunis. Coming back at the weekend but a lot of stuff to think about. Have taken sabbatical from work – they’ve been great about everything. Might come home to Paris next week, might go on the road for a while. Not sure. But give Kitty a kiss from her Godfather Frankie.

P.S. Hope you guys are starting to put things together again after the fire. Promise to get you those books to replace the ones you lost.

Kell put the email printout with the rest of the documents in his shoulder bag. He found a public toilet in the underground level of Gare Saint-Charles, went into a cubicle, tore up the entire file and flushed it in small pieces down the toilet. He went back upstairs, bought himself a ticket with a Uniacke credit card, and caught the ten o’clock TGV to Paris.

It was time to have a little chat with Christophe.

Four hours later, Kell was sitting alone at a table in Brasserie Lipp staring at a photograph of Christophe Delestre that he had culled from the pages of Facebook. In the photograph, Delestre was wearing an outsize pair of black sunglasses, cargo shorts and a burgundy T-shirt. He looked to be in his early to mid thirties, had a neatly trimmed moustache and goatee beard, with gel giving spiked life to thinning hair. The privacy settings on the account had been tight and it was the only picture of Delestre that Kell could find. On the basis that Facebook users generally gave a great deal of thought and attention to their profile picture, Kell assumed that Delestre wanted to convey an image of easygoing cool and bonhomie; he was laughing in the shot and holding a roll-up cigarette in his right hand. Nobody else was visible in the frame.

Lipp was an old-school Parisian brasserie on Boulevard Saint-Germain that had been a favourite of Claire’s when she had lived in Paris for a year as a student. She had taken Kell there twice during their marriage and they had sat side by side, at the same window table, watching the
haute bourgeoisie
of Paris in full flow. Little had changed. The waiters in black tie, wearing white aprons and careful smiles, prepared plates of steak tartare at a serving station just a pace from the entrance. The manager, immaculately turned out in a silk shirt and single-breasted suit, reserved his customary
froideur
for first-time visitors to the restaurant and an unctuous Gallic charm for more regular customers. Two tables from Kell, an elderly widow, decked out in fourteen kilos of art deco jewellery, was picking her way through a salade Niçoise, her shoulders covered by a black shawl. From time to time, the tablecloth would part to reveal a loyal Scottish terrier curled at her feet; a dog, Kell reckoned, more cherished and pampered than the late husband had ever been. Further along the same wall, beneath framed caricatures of Jacques Cousteau and Catherine Deneuve, three middle-aged women in Chanel suits were deep in conspiratorial conversation. They were too far away to be overheard, but Kell could imagine Claire, still clinging to a stereotype of the privileged French, announcing that they ‘probably have nothing better to talk about than sex and power’. He loved this place because it was the very soul of old world Paris and yet today he almost hated it, because he could only think of his estranged wife on her plane to California, sipping the same French wines and eating the same French food in a first-class seat paid for by Richard Quinn. At the Gare de Lyon, Kell had left a message on Claire’s voicemail asking her to reconsider her trip to America. She had rung back to say that she was already en route to Heathrow. There had been a note of weary triumph in her voice and Kell, gripped by jealousy, had almost dialled Elsa’s number in Italy and invited her to Paris, just to be in the company of a young woman who might soften the blow of his humiliation. Instead, he had taken a cab to Lipp, ordered himself a bottle of Nuits-St-Georges Premier Cru and buried himself in strategies for Christophe Delestre.