The Martyr's Curse (17 page)

‘Eriq still running this place?’ Ben asked, holding the rifle steady. One round of high-velocity 5.56 NATO in the concrete stairwell would blow out his eardrums just as surely as the bullet would blow out the brains of whichever dealer he shot at first. He didn’t want to have to hurt his own ears.

The dopey one on the left just stared. The fat one looked like an overweight rabbit frozen in the beam of a hunting lamp. The middle one, the sharp one, frowned. Thinking this wasn’t what it looked like. Not a rival gang hit. Something else. He nodded.

‘Tell me who Eriq runs it for,’ Ben said. He wanted this done fast, before a customer turned up or any of the block’s residents wandered down the stairs and became an audience.

‘For Rollo,’ the dealer in the middle said.

‘Rollo who?’

‘Rollo le Tordu.’

Le Tordu wasn’t his real surname. It meant ‘the twisted one’, and for good reason. ‘Okay,’ Ben said. ‘Call Eriq. Tell him I want to see him. Here, in person, alone, right now. Tell him I just want to talk. There’ll be no trouble, unless he’s not here in five minutes flat. Then I’m going to shoot you three and help myself to all the merchandise. After that I’m going to burn this building to the ground and move on to the next, and the next. When I’m done, I’m going to make sure Rollo hears it was Eriq who made the move on him.’

The dealer in the middle took out a phone and thumbed a couple of keys without taking his eyes off Ben. ‘Who’d I say wants to talk to him?’

‘Just describe me to him,’ Ben said. ‘He’ll know.’

The dealer waited for a moment while his call went through. Then, still not taking his eyes off Ben, he said, ‘Dude, there’s a guy asking for you.’ Pause. ‘He’s here right now. Says you know him.’ The dealer related the threat, down to the last detail, then listened, eyes still fixed on Ben and the rifle. ‘Oh, yeah. He means it, all right. I think he’ll do exactly what he says, you don’t get over here right now.’ Another pause. ‘White guy. Not French. Speaks it pretty well, but he’s a
rosbif
or something.’

Roast beef. One of the gentler terms of abuse the French had for the Brits. Ben hadn’t even eaten the stuff in years.

‘About forty,’ the dealer said into the phone. ‘Blond hair. Five-eleven. Leather jacket. Big fucking gun. Looks like a serious motherfucker, boss. We need to do what he says.’

There was a silence as Eriq on the other end of the line digested the information. The dealer listened, nodded, put the phone away. ‘Eriq’s on his way,’ he said.

Ben lowered the rifle and tucked it back inside his jacket. ‘Good. Then let’s sit here quietly and wait for him.’

They waited. Nobody spoke. Ben lit a Gauloise and sat on the stairs with the FAMAS hidden at his side but ready for instant use if anyone tried to get away. Which nobody did. At ten to eleven a thin white guy with a ring in his nose who looked like a potential dope customer appeared at the bottom of the stairwell, stared at the three dealers then at Ben and appeared to sense trouble, beating a quick exit. The woman upstairs was still raging and screaming, the baby went on crying, the mixed cacophony of music wafted down from above.

At 10.56 Ben heard a screech of brakes from outside, followed by the sound of running footsteps and the slap of the double glass doors being batted open.

Two seconds after that, Eriq Sabatier appeared at the foot of the stairs. He was a small, crumpled man in a flowery shirt. Dark-skinned, with the complexion of a used teabag. Bald on top, the sparse remaining hair scraped thinly back into a raggedy ponytail. He looked a little greyer and a little more haggard since Ben had last pointed a gun at him.

He stared at Ben. ‘Oh, Jesus Christ. Oh, fuck me. It
is
you. I thought I’d never see you again.’

‘Never is an awfully long time, Eriq,’ Ben said. He flicked away his cigarette. Stood up and walked down the stairs, past the three dealers.

‘What the fuck do you want?’ Sabatier asked, shaking his head in dismay.

‘I want you, Eriq,’ Ben said. As he reached the bottom step he took out the FAMAS and walked right up to the
patron
and belted him once, hard, across the side of the head with the stubby barrel. Sabatier’s eyes rolled up into their sockets, his knees buckled under him and he slumped to the floor. The three dealers gaped, but didn’t move and didn’t try to come to their
patron
’s aid. Ben reached down, grabbed a fistful of Sabatier’s collar and dragged him out through the glass doors, down the steps to the street, and all the way over to where the Hummer was parked in the shadows. Dark clouds churned ominously overhead and the electrical static build-up ahead of the coming storm smelled like burning plastic in the air. It was going to be a violent one.

Ben blipped the Hummer’s locks open with the key fob remote, a non-military refinement. Stashed the rifle on the passenger seat, deprived the unconscious drug dealer of his phone and the nickel-plated Beretta semi-automatic he was packing in a behind-the-hip holster, and tucked the pistol in his own belt. Then he bundled Sabatier into the back of the Hummer with little more care than he’d shown the dead man he’d loaded on to the Belphégor. Climbed behind the wheel and fired up the engine and the headlamps and the Hummer’s dazzling panoply of auxiliary lighting, and sped off with a screech of tyres.

Three kilometres down the road, Ben hit the brakes and pulled up. He arranged his collection of phones on the Hummer’s centre console. He had four now: the two he’d confiscated from the lookout, the one from the dead guy, and the one he’d just taken from Sabatier. He tossed both of the lookout’s phones out of the window. Picked up Sabatier’s. It had just one contact number listed on it, and he knew whose that would be. He dialled, heard the ringtone and then a gravelly voice he remembered from long ago. He smiled.

‘How are you, Rollo?’ he said.

Chapter Twenty-Five

They didn’t call Rollo le Tordu because he was psychologically twisted or ethically corrupt, even though there was no doubt he was both of those things and a lot more besides. He’d earned the name as a younger man, when some members of a rival gang had shot him eight times with pump shotguns and slung his smashed, bleeding body off the highest bridge in Marseille. The fact that he’d survived gave him a kind of legendary status in the underworld, while his horrific injuries had left him with a permanent severe curvature of the spine and a crippled leg: hence, le Tordu.

Rollo had done okay for himself. He wasn’t rich by crime boss standards, but he wasn’t poor either. He did a lot of seamy business around Marseille, as well as running a few legit bars and clubs. While he was established and respected within the illegal drugs racket, he wasn’t so thick with his competitors that he hadn’t been amenable to selling the occasional tip-off in the past when one of them was dealing in something more than dope. That was how Ben, while searching for the missing teenage daughter of a businessman from Cannes, had come to deal with him. Ben had eventually found the girl before her abductors were able to sell her on to the Moroccan flesh trade, though he’d had to lean a little on Rollo to get the information in a hurry. Rollo had survived with just a few bruises to his pride. The kidnappers hadn’t fared so well.

‘Thought you must be dead,’ Rollo said on the phone. There was no smile in his voice.

‘No such luck,’ Ben said.

‘So you’re back in the game?’

‘This time it’s a personal thing,’ Ben told him. ‘I need to meet.’

‘I’m a very busy man. What do you want?’

‘The usual. To be pointed in the right direction.’

‘I can already tell you, I don’t know shit about shit.’

‘You know everyone, Rollo. There isn’t a rotten little scam going in this town that you don’t hear about.’

‘Yeah, well, I’m not in the information trade any more,’ Rollo said. ‘I’ve got bigger fish to fry these days. And besides, I don’t like the way you do business.’

‘Five minutes,’ Ben said. ‘That’s all I ask. For old times’ sake.’

‘How sweet. What’s in it for me?’

‘Same as last time,’ Ben said. ‘I let you hobble away no more of a fucked-up cripple than you are already.’

‘See, that’s what I’m saying. I’m not feeling the love.’

‘Plus, I’ll let you have Eriq back,’ Ben said.

There was a long pause on the line. ‘What makes you think I want the fucker?’

‘You don’t have to be coy,’ Ben said. ‘I know how things are with you and Eriq. Though it’s hard to tell who’s got the worse taste in partners.’

‘Five minutes.’

‘Not a moment longer.’

‘No funny business?’

‘Not unless you start it,’ Ben said.

‘I’m at Club Paradis. Rue du Vallon Montebello. Know it?’

The time was 11.16. ‘Give me thirty minutes,’ Ben said.

He was there by 11.35. He left the Hummer a hundred metres away, as tucked out of sight among the parked cars as a vehicle of its size could be, shouldered his bag and marched the now-conscious and very unhappy Eriq Sabatier all the way up the street already crowded with nightlife, past the hookers and the brightly lit shopfronts and the two hairy idiots cruising the kerb on chopperised Harley Davidsons with ape-hanger bars and open exhausts that sounded like a bad case of flatulence. None of the ravers in the street seemed to care that the heavens were about to open. The first rumblings were already sounding from up above. Any minute now, big raindrops would start spattering the pavements.

Club Paradis was exactly what Ben expected it to be from the flashing pink neon sign over the door shaped like a naked woman. He supposed it made sense for a gay gangster to run a strip joint. It showed a certain kind of professionalism, like a teetotaller running a pub. The music inside was raucous, the crowd was heaving and swelling, the girls were doing their thing at their poles and attracting howls of enthusiasm from a couple of hundred sweaty punters, while another hundred thronged the bar. Nobody paid any notice as Ben shoved Eriq Sabatier through the middle of the throng, towards the door at the side of the bar marked PRIVÉ. Ben’s progress was unobstructed, until he came to the door and a very large, square-shouldered, shaven-headed guy with a pointed goatee beard and a Slayer T-shirt two sizes too small for him stepped up to block his way. He towered over Ben by about a foot and a half. The bouncer, Ben guessed. Or Rollo’s personal minder. The huge man glared at him and pointed at the sign with a heavily muscled arm.

Ben gave him a wintry smile, nodded his head back at Eriq and said over the noise, ‘Delivering a package to Rollo. He’s expecting me.’

The big man pursed his lips, made a fair show of looking as if he was thinking, then lumbered aside and let Ben through. Behind the door was a dingy passage with three more doors off it. One to each side and one straight ahead. One of Ben’s mottoes from SAS days was
if in doubt, bear dead ahead.
Still keeping a tight grip on Eriq, he strode up the passage and shoved open the door in front of him without knocking.

‘You truly are moving up in the world, Rollo,’ he said.

The office was square and dark, lit by a single desk lamp. The walls seemed to throb with the muted beat of the loud music from the club. Cigar smoke swirled in the light and clung to the ceiling like a thick layer of fog. Rollo le Tordu apparently existed on carbon monoxide. He was the only person in the room, lounging in a huge reclining leather chair at the desk, facing the door. Behind him stood a big black steel safe, hanging ajar far enough that Ben could glimpse stacked bricks of banknotes inside. Business must be good.

‘You haven’t changed much, Hope,’ said Rollo with the kind of smile a crocodile gives a baby wildebeest before dragging it into the river. His skin was like parchment. He wore small round glasses and nearly all his hair was gone. He was dressed in a silk Armani suit, but he didn’t wear it well. Even sitting, his spine looked more twisted than ever.

Ben shut the door. ‘Wish I could say the same about you, Rollo. Did your friends come back and throw you off another bridge?’

‘Charming as ever,’ Rollo said. He took a draw on his cigar and reclined further in the chair.

‘Here’s your errand boy back.’ There was another leather-covered chair in the corner. Ben flung Eriq into it.

‘He just walked in and—’ Eriq began explaining.

Rollo turned the crocodile look on him. ‘You’re a fucking imbecile, you know that?’

‘What was I supposed to do? Said he was gonna burn the building down.’

‘Still standing,’ Ben said. ‘That’s my side of the deal honoured.’

‘Except for the part where you don’t try any funny stuff,’ Rollo said warily.

‘That part’s up to you,’ Ben said.

‘So what do you want?’

Ben stepped up to the desk. It was broad, dark wood like the rest of the office, topped with green leather. He dumped his bag down in the middle of it. The thump of something solid and heavy inside wasn’t lost on Rollo.

‘I don’t deal in guns,’ Rollo said.

‘Different kind of hardware, Rollo.’ Ben unstrapped the bag, reached inside and took out the gold bar. He held it up for Rollo to see, letting the light glitter along its surface, then allowed it to fall to the desktop. It hit the wood with a crash. Rollo didn’t seem concerned about his dented desk. He was too spellbound by the gold bar. ‘Is that what I think it is?’

‘A lot more where that came from,’ Ben said. ‘At least, there was. And that’s why I’m here. I need to know if anyone’s brought a shipment into town in the last twelve hours or so. Handlers, fences, middlemen. You know them all. I want names and addresses.’

‘How big a shipment we talking about?’ Rollo said, staring at the gold, eyes bulging, not blinking, behind the little round glasses.

‘Considerable. I’m thinking Russians.’

Rollo nodded pensively, anxiety flashing in his expression. ‘The Russians are into some big deals, all right. But what makes you think it’s them?’

‘Somebody left a calling card behind when they took the gold. Someone with a liking for black Sobranies.’

Rollo finally tore his gaze from the gold bar and looked long and hard at Ben, his glasses glimmering in the light. He stubbed the cigar out on the onyx ashtray at his elbow. ‘Have you any idea what you’re getting into, if the Russians have anything to do with this? How’d you get involved, you crazy English bastard?’