The Concierge

by Gerard Gilbert

  “Well, it looks like your attacker used the sides of his fists to hammer your temples – an extraordinarily effective way of killing someone, if you ask me. You were lucky.”

  “Straight out of the manual of Krav Maga,” says Pizzuto. “It’s a type of street fighting developed by the Israelis, brutal and effective. We were given lessons once. All I remember is to kick a man in the balls at the first opportunity.”

  “Like in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” says Maurilio.

  “Never seen it,” says Pizzuto.

  “Paul Newman… Robert Redford? Oh never mind.”

  They are through the sliding doors at the hospital entrance now, and the sunlight feels fierce to Tariq. A pair of dark glasses are put on his face by one of the doctors, as he is wheeled towards the back doors of a white and orange ambulance.

  Tariq is lifted up on the tailgate and pushed gently into a space big enough to take a wheelchair. A doctor takes a small seat next to him, while Pizzuto and Maurilio pile into seats in front. A police car parked in front starts with the flashing lights and they’re off.

  “Are you okay? How are you feeling?” asks Maurilio, leaning back.

  “I’m okay, I think,” says Tariq, although the sudden return to the busy streets of central Rome does feel unsettling. “Do you have a bag, in case I feel sick? Otherwise I’m fine.”

  Pizzuto radios ahead to the police car to tell him not to drive so fast, as they head down the Via Solferino and the Via Marsala, and pull up by the central station.

  “Tariq, what do you remember of the hotel?” asks Maurilio.

  “Erm, well, it was cheap looking… a bit tatty,” he replies. “Brown… why do I think it was brown?”

  “Main road or side street?”

  “Side street… definitely a side street.”

  “Far from the station?”

  “Not too far, I don’t think.”

  Pizzuto is scrolling down her iPad, while talking to someone through a headset. Maurilio is studying a street map. The doctor puts a hand on the underside of Tariq’s wrist and feels his pulse.

  “I reckon we’re looking at about twenty hotels,” says Pizzuto into her mouthpiece. “Most of them are on the west side. Let’s start with Via Giolotti, and sweep up and down, nice and slowly, each of the streets… go with the one-way traffic obviously…”

  “A flag,” says Tariq. “A German flag. I remember thinking it odd that it had a big German flag…”

  “We’re looking for a German flag,” Pizzuto repeats at once to the police car ahead. “Do you know what that looks like?”

  “Black, red and yellow,” says Maurilio. “It’s black, red and yellow.”

  “Black, red and yellow,” relays Pizzuto.

  “But faded,” says Tariq. “Like I say… tatty.”

  They set off, zigzagging along the side streets nearest to the central station. And there it is. A big faded German flag outside a tall, narrow and dirty brown building.

  “Two stars…” says Maurilio, peering out of his window and then back at Tariq. “Is this the one?”

  “I’m pretty sure,” he says.

  Pizzuto is talking to someone on her phone in an Italian too rapid-fire for Tariq to understand. “Si… si… Si…” she repeats now.

  “Well, this may or may not be relevant,” she says when she finally hangs up. “But this hotel has links to the Mafia.”

  “The Cosa Nostra?” asks Maurilio.

  “No, the Calabrese… the same mob we checked out for chemical weapons in 2014. Okay, let’s pay them a visit.”

  Maurilio, Pizzuto and two armed police from the advance car pile out on to the pavement and into the hotel. Tariq leans back and takes several deep breaths, causing the doctor to feel his pulse again.

  “Did I have a mobile phone on my person when I was brought in?” he asks the doctor.

  “The police already asked us about that several times. No, you didn’t.”

  “Did they search for one near where I was found?”

  “I don’t know, you’ll have to ask them that,” says the doctor.

  The two uniformed police emerge from the hotel, with a short, middle-aged man handcuffed to one of them, followed immediately by Pizzuto and Maurilio. They make their way over to the ambulance, deep in conversation.

  “Okay, well, your Omar was here,” says Pizutto. “In fact he was here about an hour ago. He left with a boy who he’s been putting up here for the past two weeks, a rent boy according to the manager. He says he hears the boy crying himself to sleep every night, but luckily they don’t have many other customers.”

  “I bet they don’t,” says the doctor, surveying the shabby exterior of the hotel. “Especially German ones.”

  “He’s been crying himself to sleep and whimpering sometimes during the day,” continues Pizzuto. “Obviously a deeply unhappy lad – an Arab, the manager said. But after Omar called today, the boy seems ecstatic – almost jumping with joy.”

  “He must be the first person who has ever been happy to see Omar,” says Tariq.

  “Right, we need all the street CCTV from this whole area,” says Pizzuto. “And while that’s being arranged, I have a meeting at the Palazzo del Viminale to explain to the Minister of the Interior why we allowed a terrorist cell to operate on the outskirts of Rome, completely undetected for six months.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  The boy is happy to be out of the hotel, but even happier for the man to tell him that the suicide-vest was only a test. He wanted to see how brave and loyal the boy is and that his devotion to his family and to his Sunni faith will be rewarded.

  The boy wants to ask about his family, but doesn’t dare in case something horrible has happened to them. But then the man starts asking him questions. Does he like video games?

  Yes, the boy says that in the old days in Syria, before the war, he shared an Xbox with his two brothers, and also he played on his uncle’s old PlayStation.

  “I have a video game for you,” he says. “It’s great fun.”

  They are driving through an area with large buildings selling furniture and things, except there’s no one about. After a few turns they enter a place where everything seems to be demolished, or in the process of being demolished. There’s rubble everywhere, and bits of twisted steel emerging from the ground. At the far end is an intact building, low and made of brick with big blue doors.

  The man parks alongside this building, by a side-door that’s hidden from the road by scrubby bushes. He unlocks the door and beckons the boy inside.

  “Hey, hey, is anybody there?”

  It’s a man’s voice speaking in English from behind an inner door.

  “Don’t worry about the kuffar, I’ve locked him in there for his own protection. You want to see my cool truck?”

  The boy nods, and with a different key, the man opens another door which leads into a huge warehouse space, in the middle of which is parked a very cool truck indeed. It is a dark olive green and armour plated, with a sort of V-shaped steel contraption on the front, like the snowploughs the boy had seen in movies. He looks up on top of the cabin roof. Yes, sure enough, there is the nozzle.

  He had seen one of these machines in action five or so years ago, when the uprising against Assad had spread to his home town.

  The police had two of these trucks and had fired water at the protesters. The boy had been far enough away not to get soaked, but he knew someone whose brother had been in the way of the stream; you couldn’t believe how powerful it was, he had said. It just pushed him to the ground like he was nothing, he said.

  “It’s a water cannon,” the boy says.

  “Very good,” says the man. “You want a go?”

  The boy nods, excited but nervous at the same time. He’s happy to be spared the suicide bomb but he’s still wary. He so wants to ask after his family.

  “Come on then, jump in.”

  The passenger door is open and he clambers inside, the man pressing a button on
the wall which activates the big roller door. He joins him in the cabin and starts the engine, and the truck – a noisy, vibrating brute – edges out into the daylight. The windscreen is covered in a steel mesh that makes it hard to see clearly, but the man flicks a switch and a sort of TV screen comes to life. The screen is split into four views – front, back and sides.

  The man steers the truck round the far side of the building, and comes to a halt facing a field, and puts it into neutral.

  “Okay, this is the fun bit,” he says. “Here are the controls.”

  The man rests his hand on a silver aluminium box that sits between them, and which has three buttons on it.

  “So listen carefully… it’s quite simple when you have practised it. This button here turns the water cannon power on.”

  The man presses. He then moves to the bottom switch. “Press to the right, idle speed low for low pressure. It’s important you do this first.”

  “Okay,” says the boy without conviction. He likes cars and machines generally, but the man’s quietly intense manner is intimidating.

  “Okay, now open our valve,” he says, clicking a switch that sits behind a joystick, “and start the water engine.”

  He presses the middle button on the aluminium box and an engine somewhere at the back of the truck rumbles into life, and a jet of water starts pouring from the cannon. He can see it clearly on the CCTV.

  “Finally, switch to high pressure,” the man says, flicking the bottom switch in the opposite direction.

  The water is powering out now, and by moving the joystick, the man can direct it where he wants. This bit looks fun, thinks the boy, as the man starts to reverse the process, turning off the hose. He then repeats the process just as before, and the boy thinks he can remember the order in which he needs to flick and press buttons.

  “Okay, I’m going to leave you to play with this now. Think you’ll manage?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good boy,” and the man gives his shoulder a squeeze. The boy feels proud. He wants to ask about his family again, but thinks it had better wait. The man gets out of the truck and the boy watches him walk round the side and away from the back and out of sight.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  After Max heard Omar speaking Arabic to someone else, he stopped his shouting. It was only on the off-chance that somebody other than his captor had for some reason visited the building that prompted him to call out. The police perhaps? They must have identified the Audi by now.

  Then the loud engine noise had started up on the other side of the wall, and after a few moments, the sound of something like a lorry being driven off, but not far, because Max could still hear it idling, but through a different wall this time. His hearing is becoming quite acute now; this is what it must be like for blind people, he thinks.

  There’s another noise, a grinding mechanical churning and behind it a whooshing like water – a garden hose, but far stronger. That stops abruptly, and now Max can hear footsteps approaching, a door opening, and then another. His blindfold is yanked off and he finds himself blinking up at Omar, who appears to be scrolling through his phone.

  “Here,” he says, holding the phone up in front of Max’s face. It’s a video, and, with a horrible lurching sensation in his guts, he recognises the television room from home, the one where his father likes to watch sport and get quietly sozzled on expensive claret. And there is his father looking aggrieved, and his mother and then Tash.

  “What is this?” he says.

  “You don’t know?” Omar says. “It’s your family. Listen…”

  Tash is talking to the camera.

  “These men say they will kill us if you don’t do what you’re told. But you must do what you think right,” she is saying.

  This provokes an outburst from whoever is holding the camera, and Max can hear his mother off camera shouting, “Don’t you dare touch her!”

  The camera is now pointed at his father. He’s wearing that old cricket jumper he puts on every time he watches sport on TV. How can this be happening? How can this be going on in their home in a village in the middle of Hampshire? It’s just too weird.

  His mother is on the screen now.

  “We don’t know what to do,” she is saying. “The Buxtons are coming round to play tennis any minute now and we don’t want to get them involved…”

  “Mummy, please…” It’s Tash’s voice. Max can hear the desperation in her voice.

  The lens swings round again to Max’s father. A man in a black balaclava is holding a pistol to his head.

  “Maxy… do what you think is right. Do what you think is right,” his father says.

  The screen goes blank. Max lets out a long sigh, like he has been holding his breath. He is horrified but at the same time he has never felt more proud of his family.

  * * *

  Mary doesn’t usually mind working the Saturday shift on a Sunday paper; she prefers it to working Mondays for a daily. You no longer got paid time and a half, like in the old days, but the atmosphere is usually less intense that on a weekday.

  It presents its own problems, of course. People are harder to contact at the weekend, or less willing to spend time speaking to a journalist. And if she had to check a spelling or a meaning, the writers themselves don’t like being disturbed on a Saturday. They’re out doing things that ordinary people do on a Saturday – shopping or going to a football game.

  The foreign desk is uncomfortably close to the sports desk however, and on a Saturday afternoon that means the sports subs congregating around the television screens, and groaning or cheering in response to the ebb and flow of the match they’re watching. They won’t really knuckle down until nearer to full-time when the first match reports start coming in from around the grounds.

  Mary herself is tidying up a report from their correspondent in Moscow, about an oligarch who has been charged with assaulting his girlfriend. The man apparently punched and slapped her in public view in one of Moscow’s top restaurants. She’ll push the subbed copy back to the editor, but wouldn’t be surprised if it was dropped at afternoon conference.

  She makes herself a cup of tea with the kettle that is kept on the floor at the corner of the news desk and settles down for a few minutes of surfing the property websites. Sidcup in Kent is the area that she and Ben are now looking at, the sort of leafy suburbia they would have mocked just two years ago as being a fate worse than death. But even here a two-bedroom flat, which is what they want, costs around £300,000 – and they are shooting up in price with each passing month. Sidcup as a house-price hot spot. How depressing.

  She closes Rightmove and returns to the Press Association wire, scanning for any late-breaking foreign news stories that need to be included in tomorrow’s edition. The foreign news editor, Charlotte, goes into conference in half an hour, so she needs to be up to the minute.

  “This might be interesting,” she calls across to Charlotte. “Shooting at a Swiss ski chalet belonging to a British national. Four dead. Two policemen. This looks like a big one.”

  They simultaneously turn to look at the bank of televisions that run at ceiling level across the length of the news desk. Charlotte is already flicking through the twenty-four-hour news channels when she stops at one showing an aerial shot of a snowbound ski chalet. The caption reads Verbier. She turns up the volume.

  “The victims are being described as a British man, an unknown woman and two Swiss policemen,” the reporter is saying.

  “British… okay… this could be interesting,” says Charlotte.

  But it’s what happens next that has Mary reeling. Photographs of two men are shown side by side as the reporter says that two British men are wanted for questioning. She doesn’t need the reporter to say their names. She can see who they are.

  “Jesus… fucking hell…”

  “What is it?” asks Charlotte.

  “I know that man. In fact I sort of know the other one too.”

  Charlotte walks rou
nd to where Mary is standing, looking at the screen with her mouth open. But the pictures have gone.

  “Who is he?”

  “Harry Kimber… I know him from way back… we both started out in journalism together.”

  “He’s a journo?”

  “Not any more, no. He’s in the hedge fund industry.”

  “Wise man,” says Charlotte. The news report is showing bodies being wheeled out on trolleys under blankets. “Oh, God, is he one of those, do you think?”

  “I don’t think so,” says Mary. “I think they’re saying he and Max are wanted in connection with the killings.”

  “Who’s Max?” asks Charlotte.

  “Oh my God… Oh my God… Max… It’s a long story,” starts Mary, and then remembers she’s talking to her editor. “He’s the banker who got Harry out of journalism and into hedge funds. They’re inseparable… Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum…

  “I saw Harry for a drink just a couple of weeks ago; it seems they’d started acting as middle-men… ‘concierges’ he called it… for a Saudi billionaire. They’d just purchased this huge diamond worth millions and were going to sell it on to the Saudi at a vast profit. Only the Saudi’s daughter set up a sting in a Geneva hotel…”

  “Hold on… hold on,” says Charlotte, who is struggling to keep up. “They’re trading in diamond rings?”

  “Hence why they’re in Switzerland,” continues Mary. “She stole the diamond basically, and vanished using diplomatic immunity. He was in a right state when I saw him, saying that he’d sold his house and liquidated all his assets in order to buy the diamond and was now left with nothing. He was pretty angry, but…”

  “Okay, slow down,” says Charlotte. “We need to talk to the editor.”

  The editor, Tom Rivington, a slim, neat-looking man in his late thirties, is discovered over by the production desk, leaning over one of the subs and staring into his screen. Charlotte and Mary park themselves by his left shoulder.

  “Hellooo,” he says. “What’s new?”