“So that’s what a coward about to die looks like, uh?” he said.
Ismael was unable to speak, his throat struggling to push air down to his lungs, much less to produce the vibrations necessary for speech. A gush of dark blood came flowing out of his mouth and trickled over his cheekbones on both sides of this face. The man would suffocate before even succumbing to his multiple broken bones.
The scene was an atrocious one to witness, and Djibril thought about walking back to his car, leaving Ismael on the edge of death. The traitor would suffer for another half hour before dying in excruciating agony.
But as he took a final look at his man, the memory of a young Ismael trying to impress Mariam and the girls back in Val Fourré skimmed through his mind, and he decided otherwise. In a flash, Mustafa sent a bullet right through the man’s forehead. By finishing him off, he was doing him a favor, he reasoned. For old time’s sake.
His job was done.
. . .
“Now that the matter is settled with Vince, are you going to tell us why Ismael held a grudge against you?” Rayyan asked.
Zakariya's glassy and starey eyes were betraying the powerful emotions raging through his whole being at that moment. "I will tell you. Of course I will, even though I am ashamed of it,“ he said. “But first, you need to know... I never suspected that Ismael felt such hatred for me, at least until recently. He was like a brother to me, like all of you are. And I would always give everything I have in me to protect you, to defend you. My relationship with Ismael was no different. I brought him in over a decade ago because I had complete trust in him, and the opposite was true. Ordering his execution was the hardest decision I have ever made, and I have been torn ever since I saw those pictures…About a year ago, everything changed.” He paused to gather himself. “What Ismael blamed me for, I am now convinced of it, is that I fractured his family irreversibly.”
Zinedine and Rayyan were watching his somewhat apologetic explanation with the utmost fascination. This was a side of their friend they never knew existed.
"He blamed me for something that happened a long time ago…when we were all reckless kids lost in the Val Fourré," he added. "A time when, unbeknown to me, I became a father."
CHAPTER 48
“What the hell...You’ve got a kid?” Zinedine asked, his eyes about to bulge out of their sockets.
He then glanced at Mustafa, whose face did not convey the reaction of surprise he was expecting. He knows, the lieutenant thought, of course, he knows.
"I thought you were against any of us having kids...did you have a change of mind that you failed to communicate to us?" Rayyan commented sardonically. He suspected there was more to the story, but he was still hurt that his desire for a child had to be put to sleep. Meanwhile, the man who ordered them to abstain from fathering was now a progenitor.
“Come on Rayyan, Zak always does what he preaches,” Mustafa said.
"My friends, let me explain." Zakariya felt it was time to tell a truth he was still struggling to accept. "During our final months at the Val Fourré, I had a liaison with Mariam that we decided to keep a secret, for her safety and because Ismael was blindly in love with her – a feeling she could not reciprocate. A few months into the relationship, it was clear that we had something special going on, and we both set our sights on marriage. We had an electrifying attraction for each other, but it went deeper than that. We were fond of each other's company."
“Holy shit, I knew something was up with you two back then!” Zinedine flashed a cheeky smile at him.
“In any case,” Zakariya continued, “the death of Yasmina changed everything, and as you know, we left for Marseille in a hurry.”
The air in the room thickened at the mention of his sister’s name.
“That night, I did not have a chance to say goodbye to Mariam. And I did not saw her again for a very long time.”
An unexpected feeling of sorrow seized the lieutenants. They could not even start to fathom how painful it must have been for him, forced to relive the memories of a night that turned his world upside down forever. Zinedine felt a trickle down his throat.
Zakariya went on, “I did not saw her again, that is, until a year ago, when she stopped me in the street right in front of my Notting Hill apartment. I was glad to see her again, despite the initial surprise. She was a ghost from the past. She told me the entire truth about the past fifteen years for the first time.” He ran his hand through his short hair. “She had been devastated upon hearing the news that I had left the ghetto and was never to come back. It had all been so sudden for her, an awful heartbreak. There was no blaming her for what she did next.”
"The girl went straight into Ismael's arms; she didn't lose any time," Zinedine said.
"Yeah, she did... and I felt happy for them when I heard about it a few months later. She and I were a thing of the past by that point; I had severed all feelings for her that night. There was just no point thinking about her anymore... In any case, they had a good thing going on, maybe predicated on mutual self-interest rather than love, but still…" Despite his assured delivery, Zakariya had the face of a man full of regrets. "She almost immediately became pregnant...and despite their young age at the time; they were both relishing the idea of having a kid. The child was born, and as you know, their increasingly tumultuous relationship reached a breaking point after a couple of years. Mariam was no easy woman to handle, believe me, and Ismael had his own ambitions, which eventually led him to join us in London. He left her behind with their boy."
“The man never got her off of his mind,” Rayyan said.
"He most certainly did not. And he was visiting the Val Fourré every month to see his son grow up. He adored him. It was as if his original passion for Mariam had morphed into an obsession for the boy. Mariam wouldn't let him take the boy away from her, and she categorically refused to move to the UK."
"I feel like I see where this is going," Zinedine said, cupping his chin and wincing.
"The man was always secretive about his family life. A year and a half ago, he became more pressing and begun to threaten Mariam. She systematically rejected his demands that they re-create the household of their early years together, but in Great Britain.
Eventually, he lost it. During one of his trips to the Val Fourré, he convinced the kid to join him in London and leave his mother for good. That’s when she came to me for help. That’s when she told me the youngster was my son.”
“Holy f…,” Zinedine said. “How did we miss that?”
A sudden silence draped the room, and the lieutenants all looked down, as if petrified by the revelation.
“Her distress was harrowing, and I went to meet Ismael at his place in North London. He was there with the kid, playing video games. It broke my heart, but I had to be uncompromising. He let the kid go back to his mother the next day. Mariam and I decided to keep the fact that I was the kid’s father a secret. It made no sense to jeopardize the close bond they both shared. After all, Ismael had been the kid’s father all those years, and I had no desire to have kids at that point.”
Zinedine and Rayyan were listening attentively. Their mouths had been half open since the start of the conversation.
“How did Ismael find out that you were the kid’s father?” Rayyan asked.
“That’s still unclear to me. He probably found suspicious that Mariam had come to me specifically, and I imagine that he began digging up and putting the pieces of the puzzles together. The man was no fool.” Addressing Zinedine, he said, “Maybe he knew all along. If you guys knew Mariam and I were mingling with each other, he might have known as well. We’ll never know.”
Zakariya looked down at his phone. The notification on the screen was from Djibril. It said, “Job done. Driving back to London with the package.”
“It must have been such a shock,” Rayyan said, “the man has had a tough life, but this applies to all of us. He lost his way, and there’s no excuse for betraying his true family. May h
e rest in peace.”
Mustafa was relieved to see that the two last lieutenants had been so supportive of their decisions. It hadn’t been a model of democratic rule, but Zinedine and Rayyan had demonstrated unwavering loyalty, as did Djibril. It had been a testing time for the Mantes-la-jolie boys, but he had a propitious feeling about the future of the organization. The culling was over, and the remaining lieutenants were beyond doubts the men best indicated to take their organization forward.
CHAPTER 49
Vince Martinez was strolling through the aisles of an old-fashioned antique shop in Camden when at last, he received the text message he had been waiting for all day.
Even late in the evening, the streets adjacent to Camden Market were teeming with tourists eager to experience London’s underground scene and somewhat blasé locals gearing up for another wild night out in the edgy nightlife hub.
The Mexican wasn’t much of a shopper. He would typically spend an off day at a hipster café, chatting up other Hispanics, and when night had fallen, he could usually be found at a hype music venue, people-watching, snagging off gawky dancers and flirting with the odd girl.
But today, the anticipation had made him restless, and he had walked back and forth mechanically across the borough for most of the afternoon. He had just passed by the same eclectic collection of vintage shops and punkish tattoo parlors for the third time this evening.
Alerted by the vibration, he glanced at his phone in apprehension. The message came directly from Zakariya, but it was underwhelming. “KOKO Club.”
Vince Martinez browsed through the digital pictures that accompanied the message, having a long final stare at the man he was about to hunt. Definitely a hard-boiled veteran, he thought. By the look of him, he inferred that the man was one of those classic lunatic British thugs. He could almost hear the man’s accent screaming out of the headshot, one from the innermost recesses of the English countryside. The Mexican was clueless when it came to differentiating the many accents and idioms populating the United Kingdom. And he didn’t care, they all sounded the same to him.
He had been told a while ago that his own pronunciation, borrowing characteristics from French and Spanish – in other words, monotonous but loud – had somewhat of a Scottish beat. The way he rolled his r’s probably.
The task ahead would be hazardous, and the only edge he would have, he reckoned, was the element of surprise. The man he was expected to liquidate would have knowledge of the ground and would possibly be escorted.
As he hurried toward KOKO club – a majestic theatre turned concert hall – he swore at his mixed fortune. He had been anointed lieutenant, something he had set his sights on for years, but this makeshift initiation was already getting on his nerves.
Hijo de p…! Is this really necessary? he cursed internally, as tamely as possible. His strict Catholic education prevented him from letting out swear words; he couldn’t help it, it was deeply ingrained in his psyche. The blockage was mental, and on the rare occasions outright profanities had come out of his mouth, it had sounded so unnatural that the recipient of his verbal abuse ended up more confused than hurt.
The truth was that he had wanted to be part of the exclusive Mansouri-led mob council for as long as he had been in the business, but as he stood before the high entry of KOKO Club, he felt like he had already made his bones.
When Mustafa informed him that there would be an induction challenge, he had seethed with a chastened anger. The Mansouri brother had found the perfect assignment for the occasion, and now that the gang war was all but over, the time was ripe for cleansing the underground from a few remaining mad dogs – those who have caused harm and who would almost without fault pop up again with a vengeance.
His mission tonight was to eliminate one of the men earmarked as a vulture of the underworld, a mercenary looking for blood that would come back biting sooner or later. The man had to be dealt with without delay, and Vince’s foundational act as a newly appointed lieutenant would be to relieve the organization from this burden.
As he crossed the entryway of the concert hall, Vince patted over his left ribs on top of which was hanging a handgun in its holster. The main venue was basically one massive room packed with music lovers raving with fervor at the band on stage. If Vince started his search by jumping right in there, he knew that he would be sucked into the crowd and never find his man. He glared upward as he stepped into the high-ceiling room. The balconies will provide a perfect vantage point, he thought.
As he walked up the stairs in the corner, his senses suddenly became overloaded by the pounding music. The long balcony alleys on both sides of the first floor, despite a superb view overhanging the stage, were almost deserted.
Vince positioned himself in front of a balustrade about half-way across the narrow passageway. Leaning over the banister, he began scrutinizing the four-hundred-odd-people audience. With a meticulous approach, he scanned the hall, one row of heads at a time, from left to right. The man he was looking for had an easily-recognizable face, and he would stand out from the crowd of teenagers, even under the blinking multicolor lights. When he came to think about it, KOKO club was hardly the kind of place he would expect to encounter his target. He had surveyed half of the room without a hint of his prey, and yet, he had the nagging feeling that the Englishman was somewhere in there.
He resumed his search with the next row, carefully swiping over each head with his gaze. Still nothing. Then to the next row. And the next one. The man was nowhere to be found. Vince reached for his mobile in his pocket to verify the location, and as he looked back up briefly, he understood why his examination had been fruitless.
The man was right in front of him, leaning over the opposite balcony on the other side of the hall. There was no doubt about it. They were dead straight on each other's lines of vision. Vince was peering at Teddy Harper across the dim concourse. And the man was glaring right back at him.
. . .
The latest underworld feud had ended precipitously, and the Mansouri brothers could, at last, discuss the future of their organization with a peace of mind that had eluded them for over a year. Despite the lingering and disturbing memory of Ismael regularly popping up in his mind, Zakariya was ready to take the Mantes-la-jolie gang to a level that would place them on an equal footing with the most powerful drug cartels in the world. And as he sipped on an icy glass of Zubrowka in the comfort of his Notting Hill apartment, the thought of this impending challenge filled his heart with a mighty resolve.
Mustafa tossed the latest issue of the Evening Standard at his brother, and said, “Our little feud left a mark on the streets of London. Talk about unwanted attention. Scotland Yard is cracking down on the business. They’re arresting dealers in troves, including ours.”
Zakariya snapped back into the present. “How bad are we talking?”
“Not worth intervening yet, but I can see it becoming a problem if they persist.”
“All clans would be affected.” He wet his lips again.
"Most clans,” Mustafa corrected. “The Wilkinsons are finding a way around arrests; they're making use of their connections with the police, the judges, and the local politicians. Connections we're desperately lacking."
Zakariya was lost in his thoughts again, unseeing the phrenetic flow of the river Thames through his window. After a moment of reflection, he said, “you’re right. Maybe it’s time we work on building those connections.” He gulped the rest of his drink in one go. “And I think I know exactly how.”
CHAPTER 50
Hijo de tu madre! How long have you been staring at me?
Vince Martinez was taken aback, the element of surprise was gone. The man he had been commissioned to kill was glaring at him defiantly. There was no point looking away and pretending he hadn’t seen him now. Does he know what I’m up to? Did he see me coming? Vince wondered. It wouldn’t be inconceivable either that he knew who he was. The Mexican was fairly notorious within the boundaries of the London underwor
ld, hanging in all the wrong places with the wrong people.
The two men faced each other, positioned on opposite catwalks above the raving crowd. They were separated by the full width of the concert hall – a good thirty yards –yet they could feel each other’s malevolent presence all the way to their guts.
Vince pondered his options in the face of this unusual configuration. The blaring sound system would partially mask the noise emanating from a gunshot. At the very least, no one would be able to identify where the shot came from right away, and the ensuing confusion would allow him to escape unnoticed.
The thing is, Vince wasn’t a great shooter. His associates would agree that he was a man of action, somewhat hyperactive, but he was notoriously poor at handling firearms. His dope was knives, baseball bats, screwdrivers, even shoelaces. Whatever required massive biceps and stiff forearms.
At this distance, he knew he had a one in five chances of hitting his target with a bullet, at best. His plan of a silent kill in the middle of the crowd had just gone down the drain, and his mind was working hard to find a way around his current predicament. Just then, he realized that the man had broken eye contact.
Anticipating that the face-off was about to move downstairs, Vince decided to take the lead. Better be proactive than too late. Walking briskly toward the spiral stairs at the end of the alleyway, Vince just had time to notice that his man was on the move as well.
It took him just a few seconds to run down the stairs. He raced to the opposite staircase across the hall, and hid behind the column, waiting for his prey.
He didn't have to wait long, as he felt a robust arm coil around his neck from behind, quickly followed by a vicious kick in the back of his knee. In a flash, he was on the floor, and Teddy Harper was swearing at him without restraint. "You fucking twat, I saw you coming up there!"
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