Blowback ef-5

by Peter May

  It all became clear to Enzo. It was Marc’s mercurial genius in the kitchen which had created the opportunity for success, but Guy’s solid financial management that had built the Fraysse empire. And Guy’s passion, Guy’s obsession, which had amassed one of the most prestigious and valuable collections of wine in the whole of France. And his little brother was going to take it away from him. “So you killed him to save your wine?”

  “To save it all, Enzo. Come on! He was an addict, a gambler. He’d put his restaurant- our restaurant-in hock to a bookie. He had fresh cards in his hand, ready for a new play. But sooner or later he’d lose, crash again. Destined to fail.” Guy shook his head and Enzo saw tears glistening in his eyes. Even at this distance. “The irony of it was, the only dispensable part of he empire was Marc himself. He might have been the creator, but in the end we didn’t need him any more.” He waved his hand toward the ceiling. “Look how successful we’ve been without him.”

  “And Elisabeth?”

  “She had no idea. She really did think he’d killed himself.”

  Enzo felt the cold rising up into his legs through the flagstones beneath his feet. His hand trembled. “So what are you going to do now? Kill me and Sophie? Because that’s not going to do you any good, Guy. Like I said, it’s over.” And he reached very carefully into his inside pocket to take out the photocopy of the restored ‘suicide’ note that Raymond had given him. He shook it open and held it up. “That’s the page of your letter, made fully legible by a machine called a VSC6000. The police already have it in their possession. And the photographs of blood spatter on the back of Marc’s hands taken at autopsy prove beyond doubt that he was murdered, and didn’t commit suicide. Killing us won’t make any difference now, Guy.” But he could see fear and indecision behind the tears, a man on the edge. He had embarked on a certain course and, like a runaway truck on a dangerous descent, there was no guarantee he could stop himself. Enzo couldn’t afford to wait and find out.

  He flicked a switch, plunging Guy and Sophie into darkness, then ducked quickly out of the beam of Guy’s flashlight. Guy’s voice rose in panic. “What are you doing? I’ll kill her, Enzo, I will.” He started dragging her along the end of the racks flashing the beam of his electric torch up and down the rows. Then he froze at the sound of breaking glass. “For God’s sake, Enzo, what was that?”

  Enzo’s voice boomed out of the darkness. “A St. Emilion Grand Cru, 2005, Guy. Worth what… a hundred and fifty euros?”

  “Stop it! I swear I’ll kill her.”

  “Harm a single hair on her head, and I’ll break every fucking bottle in this cave.” The menace in his voice in no way reflected the uncertainty in his heart. But he’d made his play. He had to see it through now. The sound of more breaking glass echoed around the glistening bedrock. “That was a Crozes Hermitages. Oh, and here’s a good one. Lynch Bages. Must be more than a thousand euros in this one.” Enzo dashed it on the floor. The smell of wine, like fresh blood, filled the air. And he went running down the aisle between the racks pulling out bottles at random, letting them smash on the floor behind him. “Are you dying a little bit with every bottle, Guy?” he shouted.

  Guy’s shriek of anguish filled the cellar, and the deafening report of a gunshot stopped Enzo in his tracks. Guy’s flashlight swung around the end of the row, catching Enzo full in it’s beam. Guy still held Sophie by the neck, but Enzo could see the panic in his eyes as he directed his torch toward the broken glass and priceless wine that pooled on the floor. He no longer had the gun at Sophie’s head, and she used the moment to drive an elbow hard into his gut.

  He grunted in pain and cursed, the beam of his flashlight crazily criss-crossing the cave as Sophie struggled to break free. Then it fell from his hand and rolled away across the floor. He swung a fist blindly in her direction, catching her on the cheekbone and sending her spinning away in the darkness to fall semi-conscious to the flags.

  Enzo made his move, trying to cover the four or five meters between them before Guy had a chance to recover. But Guy was quick to swing the gun in his direction. And even by the reflected light of the fallen flashlight, Enzo could see the intent in his eyes. He knew, in that moment, there was nothing he could do to stop him from pulling the trigger.

  The sound of the shot reverberated around the walls, and Enzo staggered two steps back, clutching his chest, wondering why he could feel no pain. He looked down and saw there was no blood on his hand as Guy toppled backwards, crashing into a row of wine bottles and sending the rack tipping over to smash its precious cargo and spill its contents over the floor. Priceless wine washed all around him. Worthless now.

  The bullet wound was almost in the center of Guy’s chest. His head was pushed forward by the rack that semi-supported his fallen body. His eyes were wide open, staring at the wound, as if in disbelief. But he was quite dead.

  The cave was suddenly flooded with light. Enzo turned to see Elisabeth standing on the top step, the gun she had used to shoot her husband’s killer and one-time lover still trembling in her hand. “I never knew,” was all she said.

  It had taken a plough to clear the road up to the auberge and make it accessible for the phalanx of police vehicles and ambulances that was gathered now at the front entrance of the hotel. Blue and orange lights flashed out of sync, casting alternating color tints across the virgin snow that lay thick all around.

  It had stopped snowing now, and with a clearing sky temperatures were plunging, forming a hard crust on the snow, and ice in the tire tracks up the hill.

  Forensics officers from the police scientifique were still meticulously photographing the scene in the cave before the waiting medics could remove the body. Enzo had already briefed the first gendarmes on the scene, but he knew that a long night of interrogation and official statements lay ahead.

  Sophie’s cheek, where Guy had struck her, was swollen and already darkening. One of the Samu had washed and dressed the broken skin where blood had been drawn. She was shaken, but otherwise alright.

  She stood on the top step, wrapped in a blanket, her father’s arm around her, still slightly dazed, shocked by the trauma of the last hours. Enzo could feel her trembling against his body.

  They moved aside to allow two officers to lead an ashen Elisabeth Fraysse to a waiting van. She glanced at them both, but passed without a word. Enzo and Sophie watched the gendarmes put her in the back of the van, and saw for the first time that she was handcuffed.

  “It’s so sad,” Sophie said. “What will happen to her?”

  “I’ve no idea. But I can’t imagine that anything could be worse than what she’s already suffered.”

  “She saved our lives.”

  Enzo nodded. “She did. And killed the murderer of the only man she ever really loved. A man she was prepared to forgive anything. Even his affair with a hotel receptionist.”

  Sophie said, “It’s a terrible thing, papa, when two brothers fall out like that. When hate is stronger than blood.”

  Enzo raised his eyes toward the firmament, and saw a nearly full moon rising over the pine clad hills. “It is,” he said.

  Epilogue

  Glasgow, Scotland, November 2010

  It was milder here than up in the frozen wastes of central France. The Gulf Stream brought lower temperatures, but more rain. And it was raining now. A fine rain, like mist, that the Scots called smirr.

  Enzo stood on the hillside, gazing out over the roofs of rain-streaked tenements toward the slate grey of the river Clyde, silent, rusting cranes rising all around it. They were like dinosaurs from a lost age when men built boats that sailed out from the firth and around the world. An age long gone.

  The grass was winter withered, dead now, like the men and women buried beneath it all across the hill, a skyline broken by marble plinths and granite crosses.

  It was more than half-an-hour since Enzo had ventured up through the dead leaves, feet crunching on the gravel, and he had stood growing cold before the grave of his father lon
g enough now to have lost the feeling in his feet and his hands. He could hear the distant rumble of traffic from Maryhill Road down below.

  It was strange how little he felt. In truth, he knew that his father was not really here. Not the man he had known, and respected, and loved. A man whose integrity, and honesty, and sense of justice had been a bright guiding light in his life. The man was long gone, only his bones lay here. And if he lived on at all, it was in Enzo, and in Jack.

  How, he wondered, was it possible that brothers who had sprung from the same loins could be so irreconcilably different? Surely to God, sharing a father gave them more in common than could ever separate them. And yet more than thirty years of silence gave witness to the contrary.

  He heard footsteps on the gravel and turned to face a stranger. An older man, balding and grey, and only very faintly familiar. He was so much thinner than Enzo remembered. Diminished, somehow, by age. His long, dark coat, glistening in the rain, hung loosely from narrow shoulders.

  “Hello, Jack.” Enzo’s own voice sounded strangely distant to him. “I wasn’t sure you would come.”

  Jack nodded. “Neither was I.”

  They stood for a long time, then, neither sure what to say next.

  “How’s Fiona?”

  “Died five years ago, Enzo. Cancer.”

  And unaccountably, Enzo felt tears fill his eyes. “Jesus, Jack! I’m sorry. I didn’t know.” All those years of anger and pride. And where did it all end? In death. Where all things end, leaving nothing but regret for wasted lives. “I’m sorry for everything, Jack. I really am.”

  Jack looked at him for what felt like an eternity, and for the first time in his life, Enzo saw his father in his brother’s eyes. Jack bit his lower lip. His voice was barely a whisper. “So am I.”

  Enzo held out his hand. The older man looked at it for a moment, then stepped forward, and in a spontaneous gesture that neither of them could ever have imagined, they embraced. Enzo closed his eyes and knew that he held a part of his father in his arms, a part of himself. And if Sophie and Kirsty had grown up never knowing their uncle, then certainly Laurent would not.

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