‘Ah yes,’ he said finally. ‘In Bali. He was going to sail it from there.’
Ruart nodded, looking at this man carefully, trying to deconstruct him. Letting him make the next move, waiting for him to reveal his cards.
‘So Inspector…’
And here it was.
‘It’s always possible that I could find out more. But it is a risky business, so…’
So he was asking for money.
‘So?’
‘Well I’m happy to make some inquiries for you…. Particularly if you get me my Marzocco back…heh heh… But first I, er…’
But first he wanted a little incentive, and Paris could afford it. Is that what you are thinking, Mister Éric?
‘I will need to know more background,’ Éric said. ‘More about this… Dominique… Drague.’
‘Drayle.’
Why was Éric so determined to know more? Why was it being made a condition for helping? Unless it wasn’t a condition at all and this was part of his game? Perhaps he was pretending he didn’t know these things when he really did? And if so, why? Because he wanted to find out how much Ruart knew? Why?
Clearly, he was going to have to tread carefully.
Ruart had no intention of bringing up his personal investment in this – what happened to his sister – and there was nothing to be gained by running through the all too extensive list of Drayle’s offences committed in the course of cutting his swathe across the globe, even if Éric wasn’t testing him and didn’t know about them already. They were public knowledge anyway. On the other hand, he decided to feed Éric a few scraps of information about the Diamond Moon, and work out for himself whether his new coffee-making friend was what he claimed to be, whether he was being, as the English say, “on the level”.
‘We know,’ Ruart began, choosing his words carefully, ‘that the Diamond Moon was supposedly running dive tours to shipwrecks off the Namibian coast. Ostensibly for people interested in the historical aspect. And for the pure thrill of wreck diving. All was not as it seemed however.’
Éric’s face was a perfect blank. Not a twitch.
‘We believe this diving enterprise was merely a front. Drayle and his team were, in fact… running drugs.’
He made this last part up, of course, as a test. He knew drugs had never been Drayle’s thing – too plebeian, too vulgar – and that, in fact, he was running an illegal trade in art and ancient artefacts, including the so-called Isfahan decagon which the Japanese girl, Ishiko, had stolen and managed to escape with, immediately after killing the dive instructor Bertrand; and he knew Drayle was the boss of a breakaway Russian mafia organisation called Black Star and that Ishiko was acting for a rival one, possibly Ukrainian or Georgian. But he was keeping all this to himself for now. And he certainly wasn’t about to tell Éric about the disappearance of Arnaud, his informer on the Diamond Moon who’d been posing as a dive tour passenger. Originally a dockworker from Marseilles, Arnaud was tough – an ex-mercenary who’d fought in Chad and the Congo and someone Ruart had thought would have had no trouble looking after himself. And even though it appeared his remains had been discovered in South Africa, their identity was yet to be confirmed – a pendant found nearby was all they had to go on so far – and if there was still a chance he was alive somewhere, still undercover, Ruart didn’t want to be the one to endanger him.
‘Really,’ said Éric. ‘So Monsieur Drague is a drug smuggler.’
‘Monsieur Drayle is, yes, I’m afraid. But that’s not all. He’s suspected of being involved in a number of disappearances. People from the yacht.’
‘How many?’
‘Four.’ Ruart knew very well there were five: Bertrand, Ishiko, Arnaud, the navigator Gerhard and another crew member, Philippe. But this was another test. ‘There were five, but one of them has turned up alive and actually… I’m hoping they might be able to help us.’
He was hoping Éric might betray a keenness to know which of the five had turned up and was betraying Drayle’s side of things, but there was still no reaction, other than a little nodding. And Ruart was not naive: the problem with this approach was that it was unlikely to uncover a professional, a seasoned criminal well-used to police questions and keeping a poker face. It would only succeed if the suspect was an inexperienced associate, so that was about all he could rule out. But then, a little glimmer, an opening:
‘Which one?’ Éric asked, adding a barely perceptible lift of his eyebrows. Barely, but Ruart caught it. It was enough to convince him that his new best friend was not, after all, being fully frank.
‘Which what.’
‘Which one was found?’
Ruart stared at him for a moment.
‘So you know about the disappearances.’
The briefest of hesitations and then:
‘No,’ Éric said. ‘Not at all. Other than from you. So four people are still missing, huh. That’s sounds bad.’
It was enough for Ruart. He decided to close the conversation down without raising any suspicions, and he indicated he had to go. Finished his coffee. Put his cup down. Handed his card to Éric.
‘Call me if anything occurs to you. We need to catch this guy.’
‘Sure will. Good luck.’
A final thought. ‘By the way,’ Ruart said before heading off. ‘Have you seen an Italian man who seems to hang around here? Hawaiian shirt? Pony tail?’
Éric, with a long, slow shrug, choreographed with a down-turning mouth and a turn of the head, telegraphed that he was claiming he hadn’t. It was nothing if not straight off the stage of the Théâtre de la Huchette.
‘Or a beefy white guy in a charcoal grey suit and glasses?’
Éric slowly shook his head, radiating great regret, sad as a lost puppy. ‘I don’t think…’ he began, but Ruart had already given up on getting anything useful out of this Marcel Marceau of a witness.
‘Thanks for the coffee,’ Ruart said, already hotfooting it out of there.
‘You’re welcome. Enjoy your stay.’
Ten metres away, and still not safely clear, when…
‘Hey Inspector!’ Éric again, in a big voice that made his customers look up. ‘If you catch up with them, don’t forget my Marzocco!’
37. 20° 56' 6" S 55° 17' 4" E
(Le Port, Réunion)
1.15pm Réunion Time (09:15 UTC)
Saturday, 19 October
The Breitling was showing a quarter past one when he left Éric and his mobile café. The harbour master was still out (unsurprisingly), and Ruart was not particularly enthused by the idea of spending an indeterminate period of time hanging around for “clam lips”. Of course Éric could have been making it up, been trying to put him off a scent.. and actually, the more he thought about it, the guy most likely was making it up. He wondered what the connection was with Drayle – there had to be one, surely – but he decided his best bet was to head back to Saint-Denis and regroup. Order his thoughts. He could always come back later. Anyway, he felt like a swim and he’d stupidly left his swimming gear back in the hotel room. Another fifteen minutes or so past Le Port, and you supposedly reach some of the best beaches on the island. With white sand! What an idiot.
Sitting in the cab on his way back, the dark wall of basalt sliding by outside his window seemed to be telling him the island was a fortress he would never be given access to. A big “who goes there”, was what it was telling him.
And he recalled the phone call he’d received the previous night in Paris, just before boarding his plane. It was from the Préfecture. As well as the news about Ishiko stealing the decagon (a final communiqué from Arnaud it would seem – Ruart felt he was always the last to be informed about these things), they had some new information about the Prospero’s Dancer and its cargo.
He’d already known a bit about the Prospero’s Dancer: namely that it was a British clipper originally used for the tea trade with China but had been enlisted into the opium trade (selling Indian opium to the Chinese in exchange
for payment in silver and other treasures) and had been coming back from a trip to Macau – it was 1838, just before the beginning of the first opium war – when it struck a reef off the coast of what is now Namibia and sank with the loss of all hands. He knew about the treasures it had been carrying, broadly speaking. Through his man on the Diamond Moon, Arnaud, he’d heard about what Drayle called the “Isfahan decagon” although had little information on it. He only knew that Drayle was particularly excited about its recovery.
What had recently been discovered though – in this case by a doctoral student in London working out of a back room in the British Museum and slaving away for years unseen and unrecognised– was that this mysterious decagon could well contain value and interest beyond its historical significance. While it wasn’t completely clear as yet what this might entail, the records were suggesting that it had embarked upon a truly remarkable journey. If this scholar was right, it originated in Isfahan, Iran in the fifteenth century (circa 1480) and had been crossing the oceans ever since: there was evidence of it having shown up not long afterwards in Moorish Spain, in Granada; and after that, on the other side of the Iberian peninsula in Lisbon; and later again in Macau, China, from as early as the second half of the sixteenth century. Whatever its provenance, its travels had been somewhat curtailed by a reef off the Skeleton Coast, and it had rested on the sea floor there for nearly two centuries. Although now that Drayle had recovered it, and Ishiko stolen it, it seemed that the decagon had hit the road once more.
By now the taxi had arrived back in Saint-Denis. They were, in point of fact, only seconds away from the Austral Hotel when Ruart was almost killed.
Another vehicle had come hurtling in from their right, and straight through a red traffic light. Not looking, obviously. If it hadn’t been for the taxi driver’s quick reflexes, it would have slammed directly into Ruart’s passenger side door. As it happened it missed them altogether and kept going. After the shock of it, and then the angry exclamations, and a moment when he almost commandeered the taxi cab and embarked on a dangerous chase on his own, he was forced to quell some separate mixed feelings of anger and sadness. This sort of unbridled, arrogant negligence was always guaranteed to get him going. His older brother, Jérôme, whom he’d idolised as a boy, had been killed when he was just nineteen years old and in the Army: it had happened on French soil, in the Alps, and the brakes on the truck he was driving had failed, he’d gone over a cliff, and all due to the contemptible negligence of the crew responsible for maintenance, the imbeciles known as Army Engineers – and the inquest had been absolutely clear about this: it had been laziness, pure and simple.
He cursed himself for not getting the plates, or even noticing the make of the vehicle. These people had to pay. All he could do was remind himself that it usually caught up with people like this, this kind of behaviour. It came back, like a malevolent boomerang. He didn’t like it, doing nothing, but most of the time it was all you could do.
‘I hope you got the guy’s plate,’ he said to the taxi driver, knowing he hadn’t.
* * *
About half an hour later, when he was heading out for a walk – he was actually stepping into the street outside the front doors of the hotel – he received a call. It was from the Préfecture’s contact in Saint-Denis, their source who’d told them about the Diamond Moon sighting. Ruart, who’d put the guy’s number in his phone but never spoken to him, knew him only as “Sav”. He wasn’t an undercover guy, so it wasn’t a codename. Was it short for a surname? (it didn’t sound like any first name he’d heard of). Savant? Savin? Savarin?
‘Yes?’ Ruart asked.
There was a strangely long pause.
‘Commandant Ruart?’
‘That is me.’
Another pause. What was that about?
‘This is Sav.’
‘OK. Are you in Réunion? You sound distant.’
‘Distant and…’
He’d gone. Sigh. Tedious.
‘Hello?’
‘… do.’ Sav was back, although it sounded like he hadn’t stopped talking. It was clearly a bad line.
‘Listen, er, Sav―’
‘… destination.’
‘What?’
A pause.
‘Hello?’ This was madness. It couldn’t just be the local phone network could it? Or maybe it could. Blame it on the infrastructure. ‘Hello Sav.’ Ruart decided he’d have to hang up and ring back, and was about to lower his phone.
‘What is your destination?’ This time, Sav was loud and clear.
‘My destination? Now? I’m, er… heading for the Jardin de L’État. I’m on foot. Where are you? Sav?’
This time though, Sav had gone for good.
* * *
After the conversation with Sav (if you could call it that), he walked to the Jardin de L’État which contained the botanical gardens, as well as the Natural History Museum which was housed in an elegant white colonial building constructed in 1834, four years before the Prospero’s Dancer and the decagon sank beneath the waves off Namibia. He chose to go there for no particular reason other than to clear his head and make a few calls outside in the fresh air. And for a while there, he was expecting Sav to turn up as well, but nothing doing. Not a sign. The call had probably dropped out before he’d mentioned the Jardin, or Sav was a million miles away or who knows. The Préfecture could sort it out, it was their problem. Sav hadn’t exactly been a runaway success anyway: how come he’d only just managed to find out about the Diamond Moon’s visit last month? A fifty metre silver superyacht? And despite Éric’s bullshit sotto voce act making it all out to be a big secret, Ruart’s guess was the whole town knew about it. Which made Paris a laughing stock. Probably the point. Good for them. But they’d better not be hoping he could care less, because he couldn’t. The final score was all that mattered and it wasn’t even half-time. Not even close.
In the meantime, after a quick look inside the museum, he finally managed to get through to the harbour master in Le Port– Théo – who did indeed turn out to be miserly with the sharing of information. All he could confirm was that the Diamond Moon had visited, but no, he was very sorry, but it was not his business to know about any sales and he knew of none.
Ruart also took the opportunity to call Marine. Two hours behind, it would have been 1.45pm, lunchtime in Paris.
‘What are you eating?’ he asked as soon as she answered.
‘Never mind what I’m eating, how is Réunion? Is it beautiful?’
‘It has, you know, its beautiful aspect, for sure…’
Marine sighed.
Their telephone conversations were mostly the same: they followed roughly the same paradigm almost every time. Ruart would say something irrelevant, Marine would try to home in on a conversational goal of some kind and be thwarted by Ruart’s precision and calculated tangents. It almost invariably ended in a sigh. Marine’s. The conversation that had just taken place was more concentrated than usual, like a kind of haiku version of the paradigm. Most probably due to the distance. It was the distance, for sure…
When he ended his call to Marine – it was brief, they were both tired, and the distance thing was too tough to ignore – he was well and truly in the heart of the Jardin, on a winding, shady path with no-one around, not even voices, and surrounded by a rich tropical forest sprinkled with spice trees, orchids and palms. The air was laden with equatorial perfumes. There were mangos and coconuts and poincianas, lemon scented gums and jackfruit, cassias and tamarinds and cuban trumpet trees, golden bamboos and chinese banyans; there was senegal mahogany, and there were giant yuccas with their spineless spikes arrayed like knives, and of course, there were the casuarinas and the screwpines.
And there was an African baobab. Ruart knew this because it stuck in his mind later. That shape, like an enormous beer bottle. He’d been wandering aimlessly and he’d reached a spot on the path where he could see the baobab’s trunk through a gap in the foliage. Which was when he suddenly r
ealised he had company.
There were four of them, they were Creoles or sounded like it, locals he guessed. Baseball caps and Réunion t-shirts; baggy jeans and large running shoes. Solid builds, they worked out. That’s all he knew, he hardly saw their faces, it was over so quickly.
‘Visit the Museum?’ the tallest one asked.
‘Sure.’
‘The Natural History Museum.’ It was a statement and the guy enunciated each syllable like he was eating it (Le…mu…sé…um…d’his…toire…na…tu…relle). Ruart just nodded, all bad feeling now as the other two smiled at a private joke and circled. They were either simple or looking for trouble. Or worst of all, both. He was wishing he had his gun. The tall one continued:
‘See the Dodo?’
‘No.’
‘No?’
‘The Dodo? No.’
‘You never seen a Dodo?’
‘No.’
‘You will.’
‘I think that’s unlikely―’
‘And why?’ the guy said. And then looked to the others. ‘Because…’ and they all joined in, a singsong Creole chorus:
‘Le Dodo Lé… Laaaaaaaaaaaaaa!’
The Dodo is here.
The first kick was to the head. It came from behind him and just about knocked him out cold. He stayed on his feet. Staggered. And like the first drop of rain in a tropical storm, it was followed by a deluge. The kicks showered in from all around. He dropped or fell to the ground, he couldn’t remember, as the assault continued to the rhythm of the slogan in the beer ad, like it was some kind of shamanic chant.
‘Le… Do… do… Lé… La… Le… Do… do… Lé… La…’
With all his energy directed towards protecting himself from the blows, all he could think was three things, one after the other:
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