The Martyr’s Curse Read online

  Specifically, Ben was headed for a district called La Castellane. It was a close-knit cluster of estates hastily erected in the early seventies for a population of itinerant blue-collar workers who’d never been meant to stay, until worsening economic conditions and factory closures had made prisoners of them. In the span of not too many years, the place had become the most notorious ghetto in Marseille. It still was. The Hummer rumbled its way through dismal, colour-washed streets that could have belonged in a Mexican barrio. In some places, he could have imagined himself part of a military patrol threading its way through war-torn Baghdad, 2003. There was rubble everywhere, and now and then the shell of a burned-out vehicle. Any intact wall was covered in graffiti and every lower-floor window was barred like a prison block. Sun-blanched grass grew in patches between derelict buildings and stalled construction projects from ten or fifteen years ago, surrounded by dusty vegetation and the incessant chirping of cicadas. Strings of cars were parked along the streets, most of them white or silver or grey, adding to the impression that the colour had been drained out of the place along with any kind of happiness or hope. Feral packs of olive-tanned shirtless youths roved the streets, yelling and fighting among themselves and chucking things at passing cars.

  But not at the Hummer. As Ben cruised by he saw the reaction of the kids, and it didn’t surprise him. In the context of a place like Briançon, Omar’s battle wagon was just an overblown, gas-guzzling folly of a car. But in these mean streets, its menacing appearance and black-tinted glass had a whole other meaning that these kids understood very well. The kind of people who drove about the ghetto in such vehicles were the kind who owned it, ruled it, who collected the money and dictated who lived and who died. Even think about throwing a can or a stone at a car like that and you’d better start running before its occupants casually pulled up, stepped out and mowed down everyone in sight with automatic gunfire. Then they’d hunt down your friends, your family, everyone you’d ever known, and kill them all. It was about respect.

  Ben felt sorry for the kids. Many, perhaps most, would get caught up in the drugs scene, if they hadn’t done already, looking for ways to gather easy cash and often catching a bullet or a blade in the belly for their efforts. Life expectancy wasn’t high. He rumbled past another wreck of a burned-out car, and thought about what had happened to it. One of the methods the gangs used to dispense with rivals was to shoot them through the windows of their vehicles and then set them alight. It was called ‘barbecuing’. Guns were everywhere. Rule of law was just a faded memory here.

  Ben’s prediction had been more than right. The area’s decline since he’d last seen it was worse than he could have imagined. Then it had been a sinkhole of despair. Now it was just lost, irredeemable. Something had rotted the heart out of the place and it needed to be levelled and the whole thing rebuilt afresh. Except you couldn’t change the people who’d brought about the rot, and they would just keep bringing it until there was nothing left. The only way to change them would be to kill them.

  The place had indeed changed, but not so much that Ben couldn’t find his way to his particular destination. The building he was looking for was a five-storey apartment block deep inside the La Castellane estates, filthy and neglected and looking like a penitentiary among the unkempt greenery.

  He parked in the shadow of the trees fifty yards from the building’s entrance, killed the engine and settled back in his seat. Watched the entrance from behind his tinted glass, and waited for darkness to fall.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  It was a long wait, but Ben was very good at waiting. All Special Forces soldiers were, out of ingrained habit after years of hanging around on standby for brief, explosive bursts of action that more often than not were postponed. His body was calm, his breathing and pulse rate just ticking over somewhere above dormant. Mentally, he was coiled like the mainspring of a gun, ready at a fraction of a second’s notice to drop the hammer on a live round and shatter the silence into a thousand pieces.

  He watched and smoked, and then kept watching as evening turned to night and the expected events began to unfold, like a strategy developing on a chessboard in a game where Ben was already several moves ahead. He saw the kid in the blue hoodie, faded jeans and white trainers, scrawny, North African, about fifteen, take up position across the street from the building’s entrance. Moments later he saw the three others, ganglier, taller versions of the first, in their late teens or very early twenties and wearing similar outfits, get out of a battered BMW, lope up to the grimy glass double doors and disappear inside. Ben knew they didn’t live there, even if they acted as if they owned the place.

  Aside from utter ruthlessness and vaulting greed, one of the things that made the drug gangs such a successful organisation was their strictly observed sense of hierarchy. Entry level for the novice was the job of ‘guetteur’, a lookout posted to watch the entrance of a building where deals were going on inside. The potential dangers they looked out for included roving unmarked police cars, although that posed a small risk in the core of the police no-go areas. More likely was the threat of rival gang members busting in on their business, which happened frequently and with bloody results. Any sign of trouble, the lookouts would bolt and phone the guys inside, whereupon the guys inside would scram as fast as their feet could carry them. They were the next level up, known in Marseille gang-speak as the ‘charbonniers’. Literally, the coalmen. The shovellers, the drones, the ones who kept the fires burning and the money rolling in. On a good night, the dealers might conduct enough small transactions to rake in 12,000 euros, maybe 15,000, selling anything from cannabis resin to crack. They tended to work the stairs, where they could bolt at a moment’s notice without getting boxed in.

  The night was sultry and starless, and there was the smouldering electric smell in the air that hinted a thunderstorm might be on its way before too long. The street lights cast a dim ochre glow over the front of the building and the dealers’ white BMW, giving the colourless scene the look of an old sepia-toned photograph. It was after ten. It wouldn’t be long before the first of the night’s customers would start to turn up. Right now, the street was nearly empty. Ben swung open the door of the Hummer and walked out from under the shadows of the trees with the rifle under his jacket. The buttstock jammed tight under his right armpit, the end of the stubby barrel protruding downwards at his waist. Benefits of a bullpup layout, making a full-bore military assault rifle as concealable as a submachine gun. At first glance, it was invisible. At second glance, it was time to run. But the lookout didn’t get as far as the second glance, because his on-the-job experience didn’t include spotting someone like Ben Hope approaching him through the darkness.

  The FAMAS was out of the jacket and the muzzle was in the kid’s face before he could react. Up close in the halo of the street light, he was nearer to sixteen than fifteen, with a bumfluff moustache shading his upper lip. Still a kid, but learning fast. His eyes opened wide at the sight of the gun and the stranger behind it.

  Ben held the rifle in one hand and extended the other, palm up, fingers splayed. ‘Phone,’ he said.

  The kid narrowed his eyes slightly, then reached for his phone and dumped it in Ben’s hand.

  ‘And the other one,’ he said, nodding at the oblong lump in the kid’s back pocket. Tricksy, these apprentice gangsters. The kid didn’t move. Ben drew in his outstretched hand, gripped the rifle’s black polymer fore-end to support its weight, quickly moved his trigger hand back from the pistol grip to the receiver and jacked a round of Omar’s standard 5.56x45mm NATO ball ammunition into the chamber. There was nothing like that metallic shlak-schlunk to get people motivated. The kid instantly obeyed, whipped out his second phone and held it out for Ben.

  ‘Now beat it,’ he said. ‘Go home to your mother and don’t come back here.’

  The kid took off without a second glance at the building he was guarding. Ben slipped the rifle back under his jacket. Looked right, then left. Nobody was aroun
d. The dealers would be in place by now, waiting for their first score. They’d be expecting a visitor any moment, but not the one they were going to get. Ben walked under the lights and shoved open the grimy glass doors. They led into a foyer that smelled like a urinal and doubled back on itself after a few metres, where it met a plain metal railing and the foot of the stairs. Graffiti was the only paint the walls had ever seen. The stairs were bare concrete, stained with piss and beer and blood and vomit and whatever else had been spilled on them for nobody to clean up. The sounds of thudding rock music and rap and a baby crying and a woman’s angry yelling all merged together in a cacophony of noise that funnelled down the stairwell from the flats above.

  As Ben had expected, he found the three charbonniers hanging about the first landing, guarding a bulging sports bag whose contents were probably worth the value of a brand new Mercedes. The one on the left had glazed eyes and looked as if he’d been smoking his own stash. The one on the right was too obese to move very fast. The one in the middle looked sharp and alert and useful. Ben instantly knew he was the one to watch. And he was watching Ben, as Ben climbed the stairs towards them, reached the landing and walked by, turned and started climbing up the next flight.

  Ben walked up three steps before he turned and swung out the rifle. He had the high ground, blocking their escape upwards. No escape downwards either. They’d be thinking he wasn’t alone, that his gang buddies would have the door covered already.

  Ben kept the rifle trained on the sharp-looking one in the middle. If anyone was going to try anything, it was him. Not that these small-fry dealers generally went armed with much more than a switchblade. The heavy artillery didn’t make an appearance until the next step up in the hierarchy, the guy to whom these three directly answered. That was the ‘gérant’, meaning the manager, who recruited, controlled, and now and then weeded out by means of a bullet or a knife the small guys. Each gérant was responsible for his own block, running two or three dealers and up to a dozen sentries at a time. The small fortune each block could generate in a day was spouted up to the next level, the ‘patron’ or mid-level boss who ran as many buildings as his level of seniority, the size of his balls or the limits of his territory would allow. The patron was the first of the big guys on the ladder. The ones Ben was interested in. One in particular. But to get to him, you still had to go through the small guys. Which was one key reason why the small guys needed regular culling, to prevent careless talk and to encourage loyalty. Not the most stable working environment.

  ‘Eriq still running this place?’ Ben asked, holding the rifle steady. One round of high-velocity 5.56 NATO in the concrete stairwell would blow out his eardrums just as surely as the bullet would blow out the brains of whichever dealer he shot at first. He didn’t want to have to hurt his own ears.

  The dopey one on the left just stared. The fat one looked like an overweight rabbit frozen in the beam of a hunting lamp. The middle one, the sharp one, frowned. Thinking this wasn’t what it looked like. Not a rival gang hit. Something else. He nodded.

  ‘Tell me who Eriq runs it for,’ Ben said. He wanted this done fast, before a customer turned up or any of the block’s residents wandered down the stairs and became an audience.

  ‘For Rollo,’ the dealer in the middle said.

  ‘Rollo who?’

  ‘Rollo le Tordu.’

  Le Tordu wasn’t his real surname. It meant ‘the twisted one’, and for good reason. ‘Okay,’ Ben said. ‘Call Eriq. Tell him I want to see him. Here, in person, alone, right now. Tell him I just want to talk. There’ll be no trouble, unless he’s not here in five minutes flat. Then I’m going to shoot you three and help myself to all the merchandise. After that I’m going to burn this building to the ground and move on to the next, and the next. When I’m done, I’m going to make sure Rollo hears it was Eriq who made the move on him.’

  The dealer in the middle took out a phone and thumbed a couple of keys without taking his eyes off Ben. ‘Who’d I say wants to talk to him?’

  ‘Just describe me to him,’ Ben said. ‘He’ll know.’

  The dealer waited for a moment while his call went through. Then, still not taking his eyes off Ben, he said, ‘Dude, there’s a guy asking for you.’ Pause. ‘He’s here right now. Says you know him.’ The dealer related the threat, down to the last detail, then listened, eyes still fixed on Ben and the rifle. ‘Oh, yeah. He means it, all right. I think he’ll do exactly what he says, you don’t get over here right now.’ Another pause. ‘White guy. Not French. Speaks it pretty well, but he’s a rosbif or something.’

  Roast beef. One of the gentler terms of abuse the French had for the Brits. Ben hadn’t even eaten the stuff in years.

  ‘About forty,’ the dealer said into the phone. ‘Blond hair. Five-eleven. Leather jacket. Big fucking gun. Looks like a serious motherfucker, boss. We need to do what he says.’

  There was a silence as Eriq on the other end of the line digested the information. The dealer listened, nodded, put the phone away. ‘Eriq’s on his way,’ he said.

  Ben lowered the rifle and tucked it back inside his jacket. ‘Good. Then let’s sit here quietly and wait for him.’

  They waited. Nobody spoke. Ben lit a Gauloise and sat on the stairs with the FAMAS hidden at his side but ready for instant use if anyone tried to get away. Which nobody did. At ten to eleven a thin white guy with a ring in his nose who looked like a potential dope customer appeared at the bottom of the stairwell, stared at the three dealers then at Ben and appeared to sense trouble, beating a quick exit. The woman upstairs was still raging and screaming, the baby went on crying, the mixed cacophony of music wafted down from above.

  At 10.56 Ben heard a screech of brakes from outside, followed by the sound of running footsteps and the slap of the double glass doors being batted open.

  Two seconds after that, Eriq Sabatier appeared at the foot of the stairs. He was a small, crumpled man in a flowery shirt. Dark-skinned, with the complexion of a used teabag. Bald on top, the sparse remaining hair scraped thinly back into a raggedy ponytail. He looked a little greyer and a little more haggard since Ben had last pointed a gun at him.

  He stared at Ben. ‘Oh, Jesus Christ. Oh, fuck me. It is you. I thought I’d never see you again.’

  ‘Never is an awfully long time, Eriq,’ Ben said. He flicked away his cigarette. Stood up and walked down the stairs, past the three dealers.

  ‘What the fuck do you want?’ Sabatier asked, shaking his head in dismay.

  ‘I want you, Eriq,’ Ben said. As he reached the bottom step he took out the FAMAS and walked right up to the patron and belted him once, hard, across the side of the head with the stubby barrel. Sabatier’s eyes rolled up into their sockets, his knees buckled under him and he slumped to the floor. The three dealers gaped, but didn’t move and didn’t try to come to their patron’s aid. Ben reached down, grabbed a fistful of Sabatier’s collar and dragged him out through the glass doors, down the steps to the street, and all the way over to where the Hummer was parked in the shadows. Dark clouds churned ominously overhead and the electrical static build-up ahead of the coming storm smelled like burning plastic in the air. It was going to be a violent one.

  Ben blipped the Hummer’s locks open with the key fob remote, a non-military refinement. Stashed the rifle on the passenger seat, deprived the unconscious drug dealer of his phone and the nickel-plated Beretta semi-automatic he was packing in a behind-the-hip holster, and tucked the pistol in his own belt. Then he bundled Sabatier into the back of the Hummer with little more care than he’d shown the dead man he’d loaded on to the Belphégor. Climbed behind the wheel and fired up the engine and the headlamps and the Hummer’s dazzling panoply of auxiliary lighting, and sped off with a screech of tyres.

  Three kilometres down the road, Ben hit the brakes and pulled up. He arranged his collection of phones on the Hummer’s centre console. He had four now: the two he’d confiscated from the lookout, the one from the dead guy, and the one he’d ju
st taken from Sabatier. He tossed both of the lookout’s phones out of the window. Picked up Sabatier’s. It had just one contact number listed on it, and he knew whose that would be. He dialled, heard the ringtone and then a gravelly voice he remembered from long ago. He smiled.

  ‘How are you, Rollo?’ he said.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  They didn’t call Rollo le Tordu because he was psychologically twisted or ethically corrupt, even though there was no doubt he was both of those things and a lot more besides. He’d earned the name as a younger man, when some members of a rival gang had shot him eight times with pump shotguns and slung his smashed, bleeding body off the highest bridge in Marseille. The fact that he’d survived gave him a kind of legendary status in the underworld, while his horrific injuries had left him with a permanent severe curvature of the spine and a crippled leg: hence, le Tordu.

  Rollo had done okay for himself. He wasn’t rich by crime boss standards, but he wasn’t poor either. He did a lot of seamy business around Marseille, as well as running a few legit bars and clubs. While he was established and respected within the illegal drugs racket, he wasn’t so thick with his competitors that he hadn’t been amenable to selling the occasional tip-off in the past when one of them was dealing in something more than dope. That was how Ben, while searching for the missing teenage daughter of a businessman from Cannes, had come to deal with him. Ben had eventually found the girl before her abductors were able to sell her on to the Moroccan flesh trade, though he’d had to lean a little on Rollo to get the information in a hurry. Rollo had survived with just a few bruises to his pride. The kidnappers hadn’t fared so well.