by James Easton
There was this energy to Eric. As if his small, lithe body could suddenly propel itself.
“I’m thinking of that place in Morzine you offered as collateral. It is your wife’s, no?”
“Yes. It’s an heirloom. What about it?”
“We can do a deal here. My friend puts his stuff in your place in Morzine. He pays me for that. I pass some along to you, reduce your debt, extend the time on what’s left.”
“How much would you reduce by?”
“Let’s say, by one-quarter. I give you an extra six months on the rest. What do you say?”
“I don’t have a choice, do I?”
“Henri, I try to help you.” Eric shrugged.
“I realise that, thank you.” With those words, a small something changed. It would be less money owed. It would be more time to pay what remained. At least a breathing space. Maybe he could really enjoy his family for once.
Eric seemed to read something in him as he thought, and he moved closer. “You owe anyone else anything?”
“No, no.”
“If you have a debt with someone else, tell me now. If I find you have a debt with someone else later, I’ll have someone break something. Excuse me, Henri, but I must.”
Standing there in his tights like a little mime, his hands spread out in theatrical sadness.
“It’s OK, Eric. I only have debts with you. Thank you.”
They started to walk again.
“So, your place is in Morzine? Not the surrounding area. Right in there?” asked Eric.
“It’s on the slopes as you approach. You can see the town. My wife’s away with the kids. One more week.”
“And how is Morzine? Is it a fun place?”
Henri shook his head. “It’s nice, but it’s quiet. You could say boring, even.” He felt Eric might like tacky nightclubs.
“Perfect. The simple life. Henri, go home. Pack a bag. Eat something. We leave in a couple of hours.”
“I have consultations.”
“Liposuction? What’s to consult?”
“Not lipo. Lifts.”
“Lifts? Which parts?”
“Parts? Well, arms, legs, butts, faces.” Henri shrugged.
“You do all that? You do boobs?” An urgency had animated Eric, like he was really curious.
Henri nodded.
Eric rubbed his hands together. “This is going to be a great holiday, Henri. Superb.”
They walked for a minute, then Eric stopped like he had suddenly realised something. “You must make a bundle. How did you get in trouble?”
Henri remembered walking down the same path holding his father’s hand when he was five. He laughed, wryly.
“It’s complex.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Carolina picked Miguel Pérez up early from his parents’ home in Pozuelo de Alarcón. Forty minutes later they were in Madrid Barajas Airport, checking in for their flight.
“You don’t have a lot of stuff,” said Miguel. “And you don’t have a board.”
Her small suitcase followed his large black holdalls and his snowboard case onto the conveyor belt behind the desk.
“This guy we are staying with has some. I’ll borrow one.”
He looked at her a few times as they moved through security.
“Your father knows him?” she asked. “Eva said he’s Norwegian.”
“Anders Hooper-Berg. Yeah, he taught my dad cross country skiing last year. He does all the winter sports. It’s his place we are staying in, not his client accommodation. I need reading material. It’s going to be boring otherwise.”
They went into one of the bookshops. Carolina headed for the English section, feeling self-conscious. Miguel was still looking at her, working her out, and English was a touchy subject for her right now.
She grabbed a romance novel that looked like the kind of thing she read in Spanish, then went to the formal language books. There were some thin school textbook type things. And a dense grammar book. The one that seemed right was Speed English: From Intermediate to Proficient in Three Weeks.
Carolina had two weeks, at most. The book felt solid in her hand. She thought if she worked nights she’d be able to complete the course.
Miguel met her at the counter.
“What did you get?” he asked.
She turned her hand so he could see her books. The story was on top of the textbook. Luckily. She didn’t want to discuss English.
“You know this novel?” asked Miguel.
She shook her head. “Why would I know it?” She wouldn’t have bought it if she’d read it before.
“You just took it. I mean, you didn’t read the back of the book.”
Carolina shrugged, “I never got a bad one.”
He smirked at something.
“What about you?”
“A Neil Gaiman novel and a snowboarding magazine.” He didn’t offer them out.
They sat down in the moulded seats and waited for their flight to be called. Miguel laughed softly as he flicked through his magazine. “How long have you been boarding?” he asked, not looking up from the pages.
“A few years. You?”
He didn’t seem to hear. “How are your shifties?”
“Shifties?”
“Yeah,” he said. “And your spins. Your turnouts?”
“I just point it downhill. I was skiing and someone said try it, so I gave it a go.”
He looked up from the magazine, surprised. “Really? Just like that?”
“More or less.”
“So, you don’t know this jargon?”
Carolina laughed. “Not a lot of it. It’s mainly just about transferring weight on the board. You don’t need jargon.”
Miguel studied her then, her jaw, her hands, her legs, surveying everything in a few seconds.
“You’re good at sport,” he said.
Carolina surveyed Miguel back. About 172 centimetres tall. And skinny and soft.
“Look, can we talk about the snowboarding?” Miguel said.
“Sure.”
“The thing is, I can’t do it. I never have.”
“You have a lot of kit.”
“Yeah, my mum bought it for me when she heard I’d done it.”
“But you didn’t do it?” Keeping the smile off her face. The thought of the imperious Eva going crazy buying snowboarding gear that would be redundant on Miguel was funny.
“No. I paid the teacher to let me not do it and say we made a start. Look at me. I’m a swot. I don’t like sports, at all. You’re different. With muscles.”
Carolina glanced down at her legs, where Miguel was looking as he said it. She supposed you could see some muscle there, under her leggings. She wasn’t bulky. Just strong. It went with her job. She thought he might be insecure about his own strength.
“How did you end up going snowboarding then?” she asked.
“So they said go skiing, and I said I preferred boarding to appear reasonable. But that was because I thought we wouldn’t find anyone to take me and I wouldn’t have to go. But they found you.”
She smiled. “That’s funny.”
Miguel ignored it and leant closer, turning more toward her. “So can we make an arrangement?”
“What do you mean?” She widened her eyes, trusting.
“We just don’t do it,” he said, “You do it, if you like. I read in the place. We say I made some early progress but hurt my knee or something and we couldn’t do much. I read this magazine and tell them what I learned.”
Carolina looked out at the departures area, ticking over in its quiet way. She took her time. “That won’t work. It isn’t the job,” she said in the end.
“What I prefer isn’t important, then?” said Miguel, flushing a bit.
She could see that he was used to getting his own way. “We’ve been given a job, Miguel. You snowboard. I do it with you and help you with it. We’re going snowboarding.”
“Just like that? I mean, no discussion?”
&
nbsp; “Orders are not discussion.”
He looked like he couldn’t believe this. “What about what I would like? You don’t have your own opinion? Only orders?”
Carolina smiled. “My opinion is you would like to go snowboarding.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Robin caught the first Eurostar, and by eight was in the Hotel d’Angleterre in St Germain, where they’d told her to go. Robin liked the suite. It was old, but lovely, with brick walls, beams, and marble fireplaces.
In bed with him. Drifting the afternoon away, eyes on the horizon and a warm breeze coming in. One hour left.
Robin wondered how Jean might be now. Three years older, so thirty-five. Probably a little rougher. His roughness, to look at, and in bed, dominated her memories of that night. Something Julian would never understand. How to be rough with a woman without hurting her. So all she wanted was more. Like being eaten.
She looked at the bed and imagined being in it with Jean. She’d wondered how he knew to do what he’d done with her. Could that just have been a coincidence? It had never been like that for her before. Or since. The since part of that was much harder to live with because she knew what she was missing.
“Why do you want to talk to a journalist?”
“You’re beautiful.”
“No, I’m not.” She gestured at the glittering party. “At least not in this company.”
“Well, I’m attracted to you.”
“That’s different.” Managing not to say ‘ditto.’
“I want to make a movie. About myself.”
He was like a child, taking himself way too seriously. But it was nice. She looked at the little scars on his hands and wondered which was his trigger finger.
“Let’s go somewhere,” she said.
She sighed and made the call, looking at the rooftops on the other side of the street through the window.
“It’s me. Robin.”
“OK.” A pause, and a sigh like the man was stretching. “So, you go to meet my friend.”
“Where?”
“Wait at the market by the rotisserie, ten o’clock, on the left out of the hotel. You’ll see a woman. White coat, red scarf. Follow her. What do you look like? How old are you?”
They would be watching her in the street. “I’m late twenties. Five-nine, auburn hair.”
“Five-nine?”
Christ, they had the metric system in France. What was five-nine in centimetres? “I mean tall.”
“OK. Don’t be late.”
Robin killed the next two hours in bed, daydreaming. At five to ten, she put on grey trousers, a black sweater and boots, and her black raincoat with a decent lining. She left her hair loose, despite the rainy day. Screw the rain. Screw Jean Haim being in prison.
The woman was by the rotisserie store when Robin stepped onto the street. They walked to Boulevard St-Germain and turned left. Robin had the sense that they may have someone watching her, checking that she didn’t have any tails. She kept going, not questioning anything. They went left again, over the Seine. They must have walked for an hour, the woman’s white coat like a beacon on the busy pavements. Paris became scruffier and lower in the 18th. The Arab Quarter. Or the African Quarter. Some said it didn’t exist. Robin liked the idea of an African Quarter.
Her regular phone rang. A female voice now. “Get in the blue Honda, in the parking rank alongside the bridge. Get in the back. The driver knows where to take you. It is not far, twenty minutes.”
Robin looked at the car. Traffic blurring in front of it. Paris purring and honking in the background. She crossed the road and got in.
She didn’t have to turn her mobile phone off, or wear a blindfold, or prove she wasn’t wired up. The driver didn’t speak on the way out past the northern suburbs. He stopped on a housing estate. Robin had only a very general idea where she was. It was raining. The wind was sharp. It felt a long way from Jean Haim and a warm sea breeze in Cannes.
The flat was clean and sparsely furnished. The driver offered her tea and left her with it. Then a man came in. He was thuggish to look at, the huge shoulders and the paunch, but he was almost gentle in his smile and manner. “Bonjour.”
His voice was very deep, and it suited the hand that Robin’s long fingers disappeared into. He put her in mind of a tank.
“Robin.”
He smiled. “Oui.”
He made no effort to introduce himself, but Robin received a sense of shyness rather than hostility as he settled into a chair.
She felt the need to speak, wishing it could be in French. “Are we going to talk about the interview Jean wants to do?”
She had never been in this position, negotiating the terms of an interview, and was glad to conduct the conversation without anyone from NewSpan in case she fumbled.
He creased his face up like there was some joke at hand. Or perhaps he was embarrassed. He picked up the TV control. “We regarder the er, the télé.”
Robin noticed the Franglais and would have smiled if it were not for noticing also that half of the third finger on the tank’s left hand was missing. She fixed her eyes on the TV.
Over 200 kilometres to the north, at Lille-Sequedin prison, the inmates were let into the yard in groups of thirty, watched from the cell block at ground level and from the watchtower on the corner of the external walls bordering the yard.
The guards in the watchtower had screens, CCTV, and telescopic zooms on their binoculars for anything worth studying. It was calm today, the prisoners moving around in the cold air, the sky overhead as grey as the walls all around.
It was grey, too, on the outside. Green-grey land, used for nothing. The dual carriageway, powerlines, low one-storey warehousing for a massive logistics firm. Grey walls merging with the grey horizon.
It was just a speck at first, the sort of thing you paid attention to only subconsciously. It seemed stable. Maybe a balloon. Less active than the traffic flowing on the road.
Eventually, the senior guard said, “What is that thing?”
It wasn’t long before his colleague said, “It’s a chopper. Incoming.” Then it was action stations.
“Check yard nets.”
“Confirmed.”
The senior guard hit the speaker phone. “Control, chopper inbound, north side.”
The control centre came back: “Check the visitors’ entrance is clear and no visitors to leave until this thing’s passed us over. Tower: How big is the bird? It isn’t on the cameras yet?”
“We can see it. It isn’t big. Two-seater bird. Nets checked. All good.”
The senior guard was rocking to and fro on his feet, brimming with adrenaline. His eyes moved over the giant steel posts, the mesh of cables over the yard preventing a helicopter landing. A man could fit through the gaps, but winching wasn’t realistic with guards among the prisoners in the yard now.
The chopper kept coming.
The control centre, again, “Another helicopter inbound, south side. It’s bigger. Maybe four-man capacity.”
Damn!
The yard below him was the only one in use at that moment. He took it in. Guards were dispersed in twos among the prisoners at regular intervals.
He heard the explosion, knew it was big because it was on the south side and had carried over walls and through the glass of the control tower. Another bang to the east now, close to the wall.
“Control? Is it a breach? What the hell?”
The man behind him said, “It’s gone.”
“What?”
“The chopper. I can’t see it.”
“Why can I bloody hear it then?”
It rose out of nowhere and was above them. A buzz, the yaw of the exhaust, the high-pitched squealing of the rotor, the chop of the blades. Above them, over the yard, going left, right, and it was gone.
“This is a damn whorehouse…. Putain! Putain!”
The prisoners were running to black sports bags the chopper had dropped in the yard. He hit the alarm.
The g
uards were marshalling the prisoners. Some were moving to the gate. That was what he saw before thick, grey smoke powered up in front of the guard tower. Not this, NO. He grabbed a baton and a riot helmet and exited the tower.
When he made it to the yard, smoke was billowing from the kind of canisters display parachutists used. Orange, Blue, Red, Green. Did the colours mean something? Where was the other bird? He’d left his phone in the tower. Screw it, keep going.
At the gate, they had eighteen prisoners out. Four more now walking out of the smoke-filled yard, their arms held up, confused.
“You and you, with me. Lock us in. Pierre, watch our backs.”
They walked around the wall.
“Boss, rope! There on the wall.”
“Call it in. I’m going up.”
He braced his feet against the wall, went hand over hand. It was hard. He was out of shape, come on.
“I see another! Another rope!”
“Where, dammit?” His chest was burning. He lowered himself down, defeated.
“West wall.”
He squinted, saw the rope through the smoke. He looked at the ground under the one he’d tried to climb. A telescopic case against the wall, like a huge ASP extending baton, pneumatic action. That was how they’d got the hook up the seven metre wall.
“Third rope, under the tower, north side! Boss, they’ve still got to get over the fences out there.”
He heard the mechanical scream of a high-powered bike to the north. It zipped away and was gone.
“Too late,” he murmured. He heard others communicating, talking about the bike.
He looked at the ropes, becoming more visible as the smoke drifted away. The explosions. The second chopper. They were distractions. He ordered a full roll call. He looked at the mess in the yard. Two guards were looking in one of the sports bags. One laughed and pulled out a bottle of wine.
“Who the hell was it? Who got out?”
He glanced at the man asking. “Jean Haim.”
It was a late morning news show, beginning with a flash of a developing, fluid story. Robin saw a picture of Lille-Sequedin prison and the newsreader speaking with dramatic gravitas. Live footage from outside the prison played, then recordings from inside the walls taken on a prisoner’s iPhone through a window with heavy wire across it. She saw coloured smoke in drifting plumes, heard men cheering a helicopter in the distance.