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  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Same old, same old. Except this time he went too far. I told him, “Thierry, you get in debt to those people, you’ll regret it.” Did he listen to me? Did he ever?’

  ‘Who did he borrow from?’

  Abby made a grumphing sound. ‘The kind of people who break your arms and fuck up your knees up with hammers, if you don’t pay them back pronto, with interest.’

  ‘How much does he owe?’

  ‘Enough to piss them off that he hasn’t repaid a cent of it.’

  ‘So now he’s hiding from them.’

  She paused to take a noisy drag on a cigarette, then grumphed again. ‘Skipped out two weeks ago. Not heard from him since. So fucking typical, you know? That’s it this time. We’re finished. You tell him that, if you see him. And I want—’

  ‘His junk out of your place. I get that. Listen, Abby, I really do need to find him. Maybe I can help him.’

  ‘I don’t give a shit if you can help him or not. He’s got it coming.’ She sucked on the cigarette again, and seemed about to hang up the call. Then she blew out an exasperated sigh and said, ‘You could try that slimeball Pierrot. They hang out together. He might be lying low there. I don’t want to call, because Pierrot is such a creep. The way he pervs on me makes me want to fucking puke.’

  She gave Ben an address for the creepy slimeball. He wrote it down, thanked her and promised to remind Thierry about the junk. She said, ‘Whatever,’ and hung up.

  Ben slugged down the last of his coffee, grabbed his car keys, locked up the apartment and was on his way.

  Chapter 12

  Paris is divided up into twenty arrondissements or municipal districts each with its own number, which to the casual visitor seem to be scattered randomly about the city but are actually arranged in a rather quirky helix pattern, spiralling out from the centre to form something like a snail shell within the rough circle of the Boulevard Périphérique, Paris’s ring road. The address that Thierry Chevrolet’s ex-girlfriend had given Ben was situated on the border of the tenth and nineteenth districts, where the helix unwound itself towards its outer edge in the north-east of the city, about one o’clock on the clock face of the circle.

  Ben cut across the city in the Alpina and drank in the many changes since his last visit of any duration to the place. He hacked along Boulevard de la Chapelle, following the path of the raised viaduct Métro line, and reached the Place de la Bataille de Stalingrad, where Abby’s directions told him to head further north-east up Avenue de Flandre, parallel with the river. Everywhere beneath the Métro viaduct were migrant camps, spread out like a post-apocalyptic settlement of makeshift tents and shanty dwellings, with garbage choking the pavements, washing lines strung up between trees and signposts, bits of outdoor furniture scattered here and there. Hundreds of Afghans occupied one stretch near the Stalingrad Métro station; further up along the street were the Sudanese and the Somalis, the Eritreans and the Ethiopians, all clustered into their own separate camps. So much for multiculturalism. The scene was about as far from the picture-postcard tourist image of Paris as it was possible to get. The government could send in the troops to clear the place up, as it had done before and no doubt would do again, but the tents would soon return, over and over.

  Welcome to the new Europe, Ben thought. These were problems that couldn’t easily be fixed, and he was glad that wasn’t his job.

  Thierry Chevrolet seemed to have landed himself with a problem that wouldn’t easily be fixed, either. Ben didn’t know who he’d borrowed money from, or how much, or why, but it didn’t sound good. And if Thierry had been in hiding for two weeks already, there was a decent chance the bone-breakers might catch up with him any time. In which case the job Ben had come here to do might turn suddenly unpleasant, too.

  The earlier sunshine had disappeared behind grey clouds. It began to rain as he headed up Avenue de Flandre, passing high-rises and shops, a lot of them with shuttered, grafitti’d windows. After a couple of blocks he spotted the side street where Thierry’s buddy Pierrot lived. He found a parking space for the Alpina and walked the rest of the way to Pierrot’s building, which made Romy Juneau’s place look like the Luxembourg Palace by comparison.

  On his way Ben noticed the chunky black Audi SUV parked in front of the building, which looked much newer and shinier than most of the other cars along the kerbside, including his own. He didn’t think it belonged to Pierrot. This could be a bad sign.

  He pushed inside the building, checked his notebook for Pierrot’s apartment number and climbed the dirty staircase checking doors as he went. Pierrot’s door was third on the right along a hallway on the second floor. Standing outside it was a definite confirmation of the bad sign parked in the street below.

  The two very large men were leaning against the wall either side of the doorway, like two bouncers flanking a nightclub entrance. The one closest to Ben probably tipped the scales at about seventeen stones, which was three stones heavier than he was. From the guy’s shape, it looked like most of that bulk was lean muscle, cultivated through countless hours in the weights room. The one on the right was larger still, but he’d invested his time differently and was as fat and round as a baby orca. Both of them were standing to attention with their thick arms folded across their swollen chests. Both staring at Ben as he walked towards Pierrot’s door. Neither showing any degree of friendliness. They were white, with some kind of Mediterranean ethnicity like Greek or Armenian. Black hair razed to a stubble, dark trench coats, leather gloves, shiny shoes. They looked like a couple of extras auditioning for parts in a new Godfather movie. And their presence outside Pierrot’s door left Ben in little doubt that Thierry’s creditors had indeed already managed to track him down.

  Ben didn’t slacken his step as he walked up to them. He stopped, standing about five feet from the door, making a triangle with the muscleman on his right and the baby orca on his left. Each was a couple of inches taller than Ben, who measured just a fraction short of six feet. They stared. He stared back. He would have offered them a nice smile, but they didn’t seem in the mood for pleasantries.

  Ben said in French, ‘Salut les gars.’ Hi, guys. Bright and affable. There was no reply. He couldn’t hear any sounds of hideous torture coming from the other side of the door, just some muffled conversational voices. It was hard to say how many of their associates were inside the apartment. He’d find out soon enough.

  Ben pointed at the door. ‘I’ve come to see my friend Pierrot. How about stepping out of the way so I can go inside?’

  ‘Fuck off,’ the muscleman said. Ben hadn’t really expected much more in the way of eloquence.

  ‘You know, this doesn’t have to go badly,’ he said. ‘Whatever Thierry Chevrolet owes, I’m happy to settle the debt.’ He patted his leather jacket, where his wallet nestled inside. ‘Then we can all go about our separate business like the good-natured gentlemen we are. Now, I’m guessing you two aren’t exactly the heads of the operation. So maybe you should open the door and let me talk with your boss inside. Okay?’

  The muscleman exchanged glances with his monstrous pal. The two of them managed a brief grin, then turned the dead-eyed stare back on Ben.

  He shrugged, as though he didn’t really care either way, which in truth he didn’t. ‘No? That’s a shame. Then I’ll have to open it myself.’

  Ben took a step towards the door. Which put him within reach of either guy, and technically in danger of getting hit. But that much weight, whether composed of muscle or lard, had a lot of inertia to overcome before they could properly start moving. They would be slow, and he was fast. If a punch launched towards him, he could casually take out his cigarettes and light one up before it arrived. And he already knew that it was the muscleman, as the actual or self-declared superior of the pair, who would move first.

  It happened exactly as Ben anticipated. As he moved towards the door, the muscleman peeled himself away from the wall and a big knuckly fist flew towards Ben’s
chest. A lot of drive behind it, no question. The guy had probably hit a lot of people before now, considering his line of work, and he had some crude understanding of how to inflict significant bodily damage on mostly unsuspecting, untrained victims.

  But the rib-cracking blow never landed. Ben watched the big knuckly fist float towards him, then reached up with one hand as though he was catching a tennis ball gently lobbed his way. He caught the guy’s fist smack in his palm and deflected and twisted it at the same time.

  It was the most basic of Aikido wrist locks. Ben brought up his other hand to trap the guy’s hand against his own. His fingers flowed over the guy’s wrist like water. It took barely any strength to lever the joint so painfully that the muscleman was forced down on one knee, letting out a grunt of surprise and agony. That was what these bodybuilder types didn’t seem to understand. You can spend a decade pumping your muscles up to the size of wholemeal bread loaves, but behind that suit of armour your sinews, ligaments and joints remain just as fragile and vulnerable to attack as when you were a skinny, pencil-necked fifteen-year-old.

  Then Ben stepped casually around to the guy’s right, taking the trapped wrist with him, and drove him all the way down to the floor with his arm levered up behind his back. It would only have taken a couple more pounds of pressure to break the joint. Ben pushed it through all the way until he felt the crackle and snap. At which point the muscleman would have started screaming, if Ben hadn’t already been standing on his neck and crushing his face into the tiled floor.

  By then the baby orca was stepping towards Ben, reaching inside his trench coat for what Ben knew was hidden in there. Ben trampled over the fallen muscle guy and put an elbow in the fat one’s solar plexus while sweeping his legs out from under him with a scything kick. The orca hit the floor with a crash that must have shaken the whole building. Ben kicked him in the throat, not hard enough to do any fatal damage, but plenty enough to make him concentrate more on breathing than anything else for the next few minutes. He lay there gasping like a landed fish, clutching at his huge neck, eyes popping. Ben reached down inside the guy’s open trench coat and quickly found the item he’d been about to pull out. It was a 9mm Glock, black and boxy, fitted with a stubby sound suppressor. Not the most elegant weapon, but highly effective. He stuck the pistol in his belt.

  The fight, if it could have been called such, had lasted just seconds. Ben could still hear the muffled voices coming from inside Pierrot’s apartment. Someone laughed. However many people were in there, they obviously hadn’t realised what was happening outside.

  The bodybuilder was curled up on the floor holding onto his broken arm and moaning in agony. Ben flipped him over, frisked him and found an identical Glock in a concealed shoulder rig under his coat. Fully loaded, fifteen rounds in the mag plus one up the spout. Ben took that one for himself, too, but didn’t stick it through his belt. He was going to need it, because he was about to make his entrance.

  Ben grabbed the bodybuilder by his broken arm, levered him savagely up to his feet, propelled him forward and used his head to ram open the apartment door.

  Chapter 13

  The door burst inwards with a juddering, splintering crash. Ben stepped through the open doorway, still holding onto the muscleman, who was half unconscious and bloody from the impact.

  And now Ben could see the five other men inside the apartment. First and foremost was Thierry Chevrolet, the man Ben hadn’t been alone in hoping to find here. The second was the apartment’s tenant, Pierrot, looking as if he strongly regretted having let his buddy crash at his place. The two chums were sitting side by side on a pair of mismatched chairs, with their wrists tied behind them, their ankles bound to the chair legs, and gags tightly stretched across their mouths. Their faces were pallid with terror, their eyes wide and staring at Ben as he appeared in the doorway. Until just a second ago they’d been looking up at the third, fourth and fifth men in the room, who were standing in a loose semicircle in front of their victims.

  The three gangsters simultaneously turned to face the door as Ben appeared. The ones on the left and right were just as large as the pair who’d been posted outside on guard duty, and pretty much carbon copies. Dark hair buzzed close to the scalp, dark trench coats, shiny shoes. The one in the middle was very different, and not because he was the only one not wearing the standard-issue gangster trench coat.

  He stood less than five feet in height, but his eyes blazed with a fierce intelligence lacking in any of his much larger accomplices. Ben instantly took him to be the boss man of the operation, about twice as hard-boiled and three times as psychopathic as his underlings, as though all that aggression and violence had been concentrated into a smaller, meaner, undiluted package. If he’d been a dog he’d have been a wiry terrier-cross mongrel ready without hesitation to rip into Rottweilers six times his size. He was wearing a double-breasted suit that would have fitted a twelve-year-old, expensively tailor made. He had no hair at all, and like a lot of bald guys it was hard to pin an age on him. He could have been thirty, or fifty. A sickle-shaped scar distorted his left cheek, from the corner of his mouth to his earlobe, and accentuated the sneer of hatred that he was turning on Ben at this moment.

  Ben was more concerned about the curved sabre clenched in the little hard guy’s fist. So, judging by the looks of utter terror on their faces, were Thierry and Pierrot. It seemed that he’d been about to take a swing at one of them when the door had burst open and interrupted him. Presumably, first to get the chop would have been Pierrot, before the little guy decided what to do about Thierry. Which probably depended on Thierry’s ability or otherwise to pay his debts, and whether the little guy considered it worth trying to get him to cough up the money or just make an example of him by slicing and dicing him into small, bloody pieces.

  But all that was a secondary consideration now, as the stranger joined the party. The little guy’s scarred face hardened like iron. It took him only a fraction of a second to get over his surprise at Ben’s entrance, and fly into the attack. Being small and light on his feet, he was also exceptionally fast. He came at Ben whirling the sabre, the curved blade whistling as it sliced the air in a downward diagonal, right to left.

  Ben propelled the stunned guard forwards to meet the savage strike, like a human shield. The little guy could do little to halt the momentum of the swinging blade, and it chopped into his own man’s left shoulder, sinking deep. Trapezius muscle severed, collar bone cleaved in half, probably a lot of other irreversible damage as well. Blood sprayed from the wound. The guard sprawled to the floor, twitched and lay still. The little guy stared down at him, then back up at Ben, eyes burning with fury.

  Meanwhile the two big men either side of him reached into their trench coats and pulled out their guns. Two more identical Glocks, each fitted with the same kind of long silencer. They could have unloaded all thirty-two rounds into Ben and none of the neighbours would have heard a thing.

  Ben wasn’t going to let that happen. But he wasn’t going to kill anyone, either. He’d seen enough death today already.

  So instead he shot each of them through the foot, in such quick succession that the muted coughs of the silenced 9mm in his hand sounded like one ragged, elongated report. The big guy on his left got it in the left foot, and the one on his right got it in the right foot, the copper-jacketed bullets punching straight through the shiny leather of their shoes, and straight through the flesh and muscle inside. Before pulling the trigger Ben had already decided that the floorboards were likely thick enough to stop the bullets, to prevent anyone downstairs from getting hurt. Health and safety were important considerations at such times.

  The two big guys simultaneously dropped their guns and collapsed like sacks of washing, howling in pain as they clutched their perforated feet. Before they’d even hit the floor, Ben had the Glock pointed towards the short guy’s face.

  Ben said, ‘Do yourself a favour, little man.’

  The sabre remained suspended in the air fo
r a few instants, during which the psychopathic dwarf looked as though he was seriously considering taking another swing. Ben lowered his aim to point the pistol at his groin. His finger tightened on the trigger. He said, ‘Really?’

  The little boss man relented, lowered the sabre and let it drop with a clatter to the floor, though the snarl of ferocious hatred never left his face. He spat.

  Ben said, ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Paulo Fraticelli,’ the little guy growled.

  ‘Never heard of you.’

  Fraticelli’s eyes gleamed. ‘You will. Make no mistake about that.’

  Ben shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. You’re in the wrong job, Paulo. Go back to picking pockets or smuggling cigarettes, or whatever pissy little racket you came from. Messing with my friends is bad for your health.’

  ‘You’re a fucking dead man walking.’

  ‘At least I can walk,’ Ben said, pointing at Fraticelli’s associates on the floor. The little guy glanced down at them too. Only for a second, but a second was long enough a distraction. Ben stepped towards him and kicked him savagely in the balls, plenty hard enough to squash them flat. Fraticelli let out a screech and doubled over forwards, with perfect timing for Ben’s knee to ram him brutally in the face and knock him out cold. He hit the floor with much less of a crash than his henchmen.

  The muscleman still wasn’t moving. Ben didn’t think he was dead, but he was certainly losing a lot of blood from the gaping slash in his shoulder. Before long it was going to start dripping through the ceiling of the apartment below. Meanwhile his two colleagues with the perforated feet were making an awful lot of noise. Ben said, ‘Enough of the racket, guys. People live here.’ He stepped over to one of them and kicked him in the head, and the noise level in the room dropped by half. Then he stepped over to the other. Same job. The apartment was suddenly much quieter.

  ‘Peace at last,’ Ben said. He stuck the silenced Glock through his belt next to the other. Thierry and Pierrot were boggling at him from their chairs. He went over to them and pulled off their gags, Thierry first, then his friend.