Confession

by Martin O'Brien

  ‘My father held you in high regard,’ she began.

  ‘I’m very flattered that he should have thought so, mademoiselle. I just do my job as best I can,’ replied Guillermo, lowering his eyes modestly but letting them stray, as he did so, across the buttoned swell of her jacket. God, he thought, she was a sexy woman. She reminded him of Madonna: haughty, hard . . . but evil too. He’d heard someone say that she liked girls, exclusively, but he couldn’t believe it. If it was true, it was a tragedy.

  Virginie nodded, smiled again. There was a ring with a diamond the size of a date on her right index finger. She played the gold band that held it with her thumb, fingers held stiff, nails polished but not lacquered, short but not bitten. ‘As for me, it was made clear when Tomas, here, told me about your phone call. That tittle-tattle Lévy.’

  Guillermo spread his hands. ‘It does not do to have such men around, mademoiselle. I would have dealt with him myself, but felt that you should know what was going on. That you should decide the best course of action.’

  ‘Which is exactly what we have done. And why, cher Guillermo, it is time to recognise your loyalty, and your contribution, and move you on in the organisation. My father would have left you where you were, of course. That was his way. “The operation is working, don’t rock the boat” would have been his view. But I am not my father. I believe there are more profitable and imaginative ways to utilise skills such as yours.’

  ‘It is kind of you to say so, mademoiselle.’

  ‘But who should replace you? In such a sensitive position.’

  Guillermo sucked in his breath, as though such a question would take some consideration, and let it out in a comfortable sigh, rather pleased that his opinion should be sought, his opinion valued. This was inside track, as close as he’d ever come, and the prospect of more meetings such as this, at this level in the family, filled him with a pleasing warmth.

  ‘There is Citron,’ he began. ‘Louis Citron. A Marseillais born and bred. He knows the docks. I have brought him on slowly, introduced him to the right people . . . I have no doubt he would be loyal to the family.’

  ‘Citron? Citron? Isn’t his father a union boss?’

  ‘That’s correct, mademoiselle. A good contact. Solid.’

  Virginie turned to the two Corsicans who had stayed by the door during this exchange. ‘Do you know this Citron family, Taddeus? Have we had dealings?’

  The older twin gave it some thought, but shook his head.

  ‘So, you think this Citron could take over?’ she continued.

  Guillermo gave a nod. ‘Yes, I would say so,’ he replied.

  ‘The Hesperides?’

  That woke Guillermo up. ‘The Hesperides, mademoiselle? But it is in port already. It unloads on Monday.’

  ‘But he could do it?’ Virginie continued. ‘This Citron. He could handle things?’

  Guillermo had time only to spread his hands before she began speaking again.

  ‘Because I have another job for you.’

  ‘Another job?’

  ‘I want you to help me find someone.’

  ‘Find someone? Of course, if I can . . .’

  Virginie smiled. ‘I believe you know a man called Santarem? Murat Santarem?’

  60

  THE NAME LANCED INTO GUILLERMO’S guts like an icy blade. All the confidence and ease he’d felt just drained away. ‘Santarem?’

  ‘He is a local trafficker. Girls.’

  Guillermo started to shake his head. ‘Santarem . . . Santarem. No, mademoiselle, the name is not familiar.’

  Virginie looked surprised. ‘But how extraordinary. According to Monsieur Lévy, you do. He was quite insistent on that, was he not, Tomas?’

  Over by the door, the smaller of the two brothers inclined his head. ‘Yes, he was, Mademoiselle.’

  Virginie turned back to Guillermo, settled a forgiving, understanding smile on him.

  His heart was pounding. What had that little shit Lévy gone and said? How much did he know? What had Santarem told him? Jesus Christ . . . Jesus Christ . . .

  ‘Now, Guillermo, I understand your loyalty. I understand you are a man who values discretion. And that is good. Very good. A friend like you is a friend indeed. But the fact of the matter is that this Santarem has something I want.’

  ‘Something you want?’ he managed.

  ‘That is correct.’

  ‘A girl?’

  ‘Exactement. A particular, special girl.’

  Guillermo nodded. This was going way above his head. He felt more than a little adrift. But his heart-rate had begun to steady, which was good. Maybe Lévy hadn’t known anything. Hadn’t said anything.

  ‘The problem I have is that this Santarem is dead,’ continued Virginie.

  ‘He’s dead?’

  ‘Like Monsieur Lévy. And the girl I want to find is missing. Someone else has her now, and I need to know who.’

  Guillermo felt his pulse-rate pick up. No wonder there’d been no reply to his calls.

  ‘So, does this Santarem character have an accomplice? A partner? Someone who might have done this? Someone who knew the value of the girl he was holding?’

  Guillermo was thinking furiously. Xavier! It had to be Xavier. It was time to shift the spotlight away from himself.

  ‘Xavier Vassin. I believe Santarem and he work together.’

  ‘And where can we find Monsieur Vassin? And, hopefully, the girl?’

  Guillermo remembered the house where Xavier lived. He and Santarem had been there once – a party. ‘The last I heard he lived up in Saint Luc, rue Artemis. I don’t remember any number but I seem to recall that the front door was painted green. And the gate too.’

  ‘Excellent,’ said Virginie, getting to her feet. ‘Good, good.’ She glanced at her watch and took a breath. ‘So, tell me, Guillermo, would you like to see my father?’

  The question took him by surprise. A firm ‘no’ would have been his answer of choice. But now, he judged, was not the moment to do anything that might upset his new boss. He got to his feet. ‘Mais bien sûr,’ he said, as though it was only appropriate he should be invited to see the old man for the last time and pay his respects.

  Once again, Virginie took his arm and led him to a set of doors on the right of the fireplace. One of the Corsicans was ahead of them and opened the doors.

  They entered a small library, Guillermo and Virginie, the doorway wide enough for them to pass through side by side. The Corsicans followed and closed the doors behind them.

  Across the room, in front of another marble fireplace, was a stepped catafalque draped in black silk, with an open mahogany coffin set upon it. Two giant candles, rising from a nest of canna lilies, burned at either end, filling the room with a thick, funereal scent.

  Virginie led him up the steps and together they looked down at the still, icy features of Arsène Cabrille, his head resting on a cream silk pillow, his grey hair neatly parted just off centre. He was dressed in a shiny black suit, white silk shirt and tie, his long, scrawny neck too shrivelled now to fill the collar. A rosary was fixed in his clasped hands.

  ‘Such a small man, for such a large coffin, n’est-ce pas? So much room.’

  Guillermo frowned. He turned to Virginie with a questionning look.

  ‘I’m not sure . . .’ he began.

  But it was as far as he got.

  Guillermo hadn’t heard Taddeus come up behind him, but he felt the prick of the needle in the side of his neck and pulled away from Virginie as though he had just been stung.

  He raised his hand as though to swat away an insect, but suddenly there was no strength, no ability to continue the movement. His arm fell back to his side and his eyes closed. His legs trembled and buckled, and he slumped back into Taddeus’s arms.

  Passing the syringe to his brother, Taddeus stooped, slipped an arm behind Guillermo’s knees and lifted him up. With a small grunt, he hoisted the Spaniard over the lip of the coffin and rolled him in on top of the body of Arsène C
abrille.

  Looking down at the pair of them, Virginie smiled. Sometimes it wasn’t enough just to kill. Sometimes you had to make it special. The following morning, after a short funeral ceremony at Cimetière Saint Pierre, Guillermo Ribero, 36, of Gerona, Spain, would wake up in his shared silken bed and realise where he was.

  And start screaming and hammering . . .

  Virginie smoothed her hand across the polished wood. ‘Adieu, Papa. Adieu, Guillermo.’

  Reaching up, she lowered the lid. ‘You can screw it down now,’ she said to the twins. ‘Then call in the undertakers.’

  61

  MARIE-ANGE BUHL PULLED DOWN the roller blinds of Fleurs des Quais with a staggered rattle, tidied up the shop’s warm, flower-scented interior and, at a little after six o’clock, suitably wrapped against the weather, stepped out into a cold pattering rain. A few minutes later she was standing in the bus shelter on rue Francis, looking out for her 2CV and Daniel Jacquot.

  Already the day had ended and streetlights and car headlights shimmered off the rain-slicked street, the low belly of the clouds glowing a thin orange from the lights of the city below. A bus drew up at the shelter and wheezed to a stop. Its double doors opened and the people waiting in the shelter tramped on, shaking umbrellas, brushing themselves down. Marie-Ange let them pass, stayed where she was.

  The driver looked down at her. ‘Vous venez?’ he called out, with a lift of his chin.

  ‘Non, non. J’attends un ami, merci.’

  With a nod, he reached for the lever, pulled the folding doors closed and hauled on the steering wheel, pulling away into the traffic on rue Francis.

  Un ami, un ami, she thought wistfully. She supposed Jacquot was. Not just a policeman. Not just an acquaintance either. Not any more. She had, after all, removed his trousers the night before – they’d been soaking wet, dirty; she couldn’t possibly have let him sleep in them. But by then he was past caring, unable to help, fallen into a deep sleep. So she’d unbuckled his belt, loosened his zip and tugged the trousers down by the waistband, trying to keep her eyes on the wall above the bed as she did so, praying his shorts didn’t pull down with the trousers. And as she worked on him she’d hummed, as though she was simply performing some familiar domestic duty. Of course, his shorts had shifted, as she’d tugged the sodden trousers over his hips, and her eyes, despite her every best intention, had been drawn to that broad, firm stomach and the cord of black hair that disappeared into the band of his shorts. It had been a struggle, retaining her sense of propriety and protecting his modesty. And all the time, he lay there with his eyes closed, a great heavy man, on her bed, hers to do with as she wished.

  Saturdays were always busy at Fleurs des Quais which meant that, apart from their brief time together at Kuchnia, she’d had little time to think about him. Now, standing there in the bus shelter, she made up for it. Apart from the shorn hair, he was just as she remembered him. The same green eyes glinting behind curling black lashes, caught in a tracery of wrinkles, the depths of which, while he slept, showed as thin pale lines against his tanned skin. Of course, the clothes he was wearing were different – cheap, working clothes – but she could recall the jeans, the clean open-necked shirts, and soft tan loafers he’d worn that summer past in St Bédard. Anything less like a policeman, she couldn’t imagine. But he was, and she had to remember that. She had also to remember that there was another woman in his life. She was sure of it. There may have been no wedding ring but she remembered him wanting to buy an orchid for someone’s birthday. Someone special.

  As she leaned against a Metro map of Marseilles framed in a side panel of the bus shelter – already filling up again, the crowds pressing in under its roof rather than stand out in the rain – she wondered if that someone was still around, or someone else, someone new. He certainly didn’t strike her as the kind of man who spent too much time on his own, but she had to admit there was something . . . isolated about him. Quiet, a little introspective, as though the soul of him, the heart, was somehow out of reach, or at the very least hard to find. A natural loner.

  There was a tinny beep-beep from the kerb, but at first Marie-Ange failed to register it.

  ‘You taking a bus or would you like a lift?’ a voice called out. She recognised it immediately and spotted its owner, passenger door open, leaning out into the rain and beckoning her over. She made her ’Scusez–mois, mercis, and s’il vous plaîts as she pushed through the crowd and hurried over to the car. She was aware of envious looks, either for the man who was picking her up, or the fact that she would not have to wait for the bus which even now was drawing up behind them, flashing its lights to move Jacquot on. She didn’t look back at the queue but sensed the general envy turn to resentment as the bus was unnecessarily delayed.

  With Marie-Ange praying that Jacquot wouldn’t stall her car on the slope and delay them even more – Rosie could be temperamental if her gears weren’t properly meshed – they finally pulled away and joined the traffic heading up rue Francis.

  ‘So, how did it go?’ she asked, noting a graze on the swollen knuckles of his right hand. ‘You’ve been fighting. Are you okay?’

  ‘We have some names,’ Jacquot replied, waving away her concern. ‘Santarem. Murat Santarem. And your friend last night . . . Scarface? He’s called Xavier, and works for Santarem. He was buying drugs for him at Bar Dantès. Tranquillisers. Sedatives. Strong ones. Your guess is as good as mine why he might be needing them.’ He turned and gave her an encouraging smile, saw the light of excitement in her eyes. ‘We also have a couple of addresses,’ he continued. ‘This Santarem character lives on rue Bandole, a few streets away from the docks. And Xavier’s on rue Artemis.’

  ‘Where to first?’ asked Marie-Ange.

  ‘The boss, Santarem. I hope you’ve brought the hairclip. Since we don’t have any house numbers, we might need it.’

  ‘Couldn’t we just knock on a door and ask a neighbour for directions?’ asked Marie-Ange, warmed by that ‘we’. ‘Sometimes that works just as well.’

  Jacquot glanced across at her. ‘Are you always so practical and sensible?’

  ‘Only when I have to work with the police,’ she replied.

  62

  IN A PERFECT WORLD, JACQUOT wouldn’t have made that six o’clock pick-up on rue Francis. He would have driven straight to rue Bandole and checked out Murat Santarem by himself. But he had to admit that he was pleased to have Marie-Ange along, to have the company. And the more time he spent with her, the more certain he became that she’d be able to look after herself in a tight spot. There was something naturally calm, something contained and independent, about her. And practical too, of course.

  ‘Rue Bandole,’ she called out, pointing ahead. ‘Over there on the right.’

  Jacquot indicated and turned up a gently sloping road with a dozen houses to either side, small stuccoed villas set in their own cramped gardens, two-storey, tiled steps up to narrow verandahs and shadowy front doors, with what looked like a basement level below each verandah. Some of the gardens had palm trees, one of them a dark, malevolent-looking monkey tree. But all of them appeared tidy and well-kept, in proper suburban style.

  ‘It’s that one,’ said Marie-Ange in a whisper.

  Jacquot glanced at her. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘I’m fine. Fine,’ she replied, but there was a dryness to her voice, a tremor in her shoulders. ‘That one,’ she said. ‘Your side, with the closed shutters on the ground floor. There, do you see it?’

  So much for knocking on a door and asking directions. She had known which house it was immediately, and he had no doubt that she was right.

  ‘I see it,’ he said, noting the darkened windows when every other house had lights on somewhere. But he carried on driving. At the top of the street he turned to the right and pulled in a couple of metres along rue Cardin.

  ‘You stay here, I’ll just go . . .’

  ‘Non, non, non. I am coming too. If Elodie is there, it will be better for her if I
am there, to have a woman . . .’

  Jacquot sighed. ‘Okay, okay. But you do exactly as I say, compris? Everything. And no argument.’

  Marie-Ange smiled, crossed her heart. ‘It’s a deal.’

  ‘Are you sure you’re up to it? You seem . . .’

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said again, buttoning up her coat and reaching for the door handle. She wasn’t, but she wasn’t going to let him know that. ‘It was just . . .’ She shook her head, as though words were hard to find. ‘I wasn’t expecting anything, but the moment we turned into the road, something . . . I don’t know. All I can say is that there is danger there, and . . . something wrong. The house just . . . leapt at me. Almost as if it was barring the way, didn’t want me there. It was a little strange, you know?’

  Jacquot didn’t know, but he nodded. ‘Just so long as you’re all right. Do you want to rest a moment?’

  ‘No. Let’s go,’ she said, pushing open the door and climbing out of the car. ‘Let’s do it.’

  As they turned the corner, back into rue Bandole, Jacquot felt Marie-Ange slide her arm through his. He didn’t know whether she had done it to steady herself, because she needed support, or because she thought it might look more natural, in case someone in the house was looking out into the street. Just some couple walking past – going to a bar, to the cinema, out for the evening. If he’d thought about it, he might have done the same, but she had beaten him to it.

  Keeping to the opposite side of the street, walking slowly despite the slope and the drizzling rain, they had longer to check out the house. No lights, no movement, the only house on that side of the street showing no sign of life. Watching it through the corners of their eyes, they walked on to the bottom of Bandole, then crossed the road and walked back up.

  ‘The garden gate’s open,’ whispered Marie-Ange.