“Silly boy. Very silly boy.” Wapping sighed, as if he’d been disappointed by the foolish behavior of a close friend. “Doesn’t leave us much option, does he? You’d better talk to Brian and Dave. Tell them to teach him a lesson. But Ray?” Wapping lowered his voice. “Nothing terminal. Know what I mean? We don’t want any complications. Tell the lads to make it look like an accident.”
There are certain men, blessed from birth, whose character and appearance inspire instant liking. Gaston Poirier was such a man: an oversized cherub with a pear-shaped body, a chubby, red-cheeked face, and a mop of curly gray hair. His brown eyes twinkled, and his mouth seemed to be permanently on the brink of a grin. Reboul had said he was the best fixer in Marseille. Sam had warmed to him at first sight.
They were sitting on the terrace, a bottle of rose between them. “I haven’t been back to this house since Francis lived here,” said Gaston. “There were some parties then, I can tell you-girls, champagne, more girls. Wonderful times.” He raised his glass. “Here’s to his new project. Tell me all about it.”
As Sam went through the background, Gaston made serious inroads on the rose, dabbing his forehead between glasses with a silk handkerchief as though he found the effort of drinking to be truly thirsty work. But he proved to be a model listener, silent and attentive, and when Sam had finished, he nodded several times, an indication that he liked what he had heard.
“The tent is a good idea,” he said. “Now we must make it work. For the tent itself, pas de soucis, no problem. But the beach is uneven, so you will need a level, solid plank floor. Also electricity. We might need a generator, but I know a guy, an artist with anything electrical, who can tap us into the city’s power grid. And then a projector, a conference table and chairs, and maybe”-here Gaston paused to waggle his eyebrows-“a nice little bar with, bien sur, a nice little barmaid. Have I forgotten anything?”
Sam knew France well enough to be extremely wary of the long arm of bureaucracy. Someone, somewhere in the city’s administrative labyrinth would have to be consulted, flattered, massaged, possibly taken out to lunch. “There is one thing,” he said. “I’m sure we’ll need a permit.”
“Oh, that.” Gaston waved a dismissive hand. “Pas de soucis. The mayor is an intelligent man. He will realize that this will be good for Marseille’s image as a dynamique city, getting ready for 2013.” Gaston winked, and tapped the side of his nose. “Besides, we go hunting together in the winter. We’re friends. Maybe you should invite him to the presentation. Anyway, I think I can promise you that we won’t have any trouble with permits. When do you want to do it?”
The next two days passed slowly for Brian and Dave, but with a pleasant undercurrent of anticipation. It had been a long time since they had been given a chance to do what they did best, which was to inflict grievous bodily harm-or, as they would describe it, putting the boot in. And as a bonus, the victim was French. Like many Englishmen of their class and generation, they were ardent chauvinists. Here was an opportunity to strike a blow for Mother England against the teeming masses of foreigners who were taking over the world, including most of England’s best soccer clubs.
They were sitting in a bar on the Vieux Port, which they had chosen because it called itself a pub, a description that, for them, held out the promise of warm beer, darts, and a large TV set permanently tuned to a snooker tournament. Unfortunately, it was a pub in name only, without even a dart board. The television was tuned to a game show, with a lot of Frogs shouting the odds, and the beer was chilled. But it would have taken more than these shortcomings to blunt their enthusiasm for the task in hand.
So far, they had spent much of the past two days shadowing Philippe and learning his routine. They had followed him in their rented van as he commuted by scooter between the offices of La Provence on the Avenue Roger Salengro and his apartment in an old building just off the Corniche, the broad road that follows the coastline. Dave found it close to ideal, an excellent spot to stage an accident. Plenty of room to maneuver, he thought, and then there was that nasty old drop from the road to the rocks below. Landing on them would slow a man down.
“Tell you what, Bri,” said Dave. “It looks like a bike job to me-one in front of him, one behind. Crash helmets, so nobody can clock our faces. No worries.” Brian nodded sagely. He always left organizational details to Dave, content to limit his own role to the more physical side of their assignments. This time, however, there was one detail that even he could see might be a problem.
“But we haven’t got any bikes.”
“We nick ’em, Bri. We nick ’em. You have a look when we get back out on the street. There’s bikes parked all over the place. Some of them even have a helmet hanging off the handlebars. Or else the helmet will be in that box behind the saddle, and my old mum could open one of those with a nail file.”
Brian nodded again. This was what he liked about working with Dave: his grasp of the fine points. By now, Brian’s beer had become warm enough to drink. As he took a cautious swallow, he thought longingly of something tasty to go with the beer-a proper English pork pie, the kind served in his favorite pub, The Mother’s Ruin, in Stepney. Of course, the Frogs didn’t understand about these things. All the rubbish they ate, it was a miracle they were able to keep body and soul together. Snails, for God’s sake. Horsemeat. He shuddered.
“So when do you reckon we should do it?”
Dave had another swig of beer and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Best would be after work, when he goes out for his dinner. When it’s dark.”
They left the pub and walked back to the van, pausing from time to time to consider the range of bikes on display. It was as Dave had said. Bikes were everywhere-BMWs, Kawasakis, Hondas, Ducatis, even a highly polished Harley-and they had been left in places consistent with the cavalier French habit of parking wherever you please, regardless of regulations.
“We don’t want anything too flash,” said Dave. “Nothing that anyone would remember. And we’ll have to muddy up the number plates.” He ran his hand over a nearby Yamaha and patted the saddle. “Right. Here’s what we’ll do. Tonight, around two o’clock when it’s nice and quiet, we’ll nick the bikes and load ’em in the van. Tomorrow night we’ll do the job and dump the bikes. Piece of cake.”
Brian nodded. “Piece of cake, Dave.”
Philippe was working late, putting the final touches to the article he had spent the afternoon writing. His brush with Ray Prendergast still rankled, and this had caused him to be more than normally enthusiastic about Sam’s idea of putting a tent on the beach. It was, so he wrote, a breath of fresh air blowing into the murky, secretive, and often corrupt world of urban development. He went on to add to the complimentary remarks he’d already made about Sam’s project in a previous article, and finished off with a question: Would the other two projects show similar imagination, or was it going to be business as usual behind closed doors?
He leaned back in his chair, rubbed his eyes, and looked at his watch. An evening of duty lay ahead-the monthly dinner with Elodie and Raoul, Mimi’s parents. If this followed its normal course, there would be discreet questions about his career prospects and a gentle hint or two about getting rid of his scooter, buying a car, and, as Elodie always put it, “settling down.” It was a source of constant surprise to Philippe that this implacably bourgeois couple could ever have produced an unconventional daughter like Mimi. He remembered when she had dyed her hair that wonderful deep red. The parental shock-and barely concealed disapproval-had lasted for weeks. Ah, well. They were basically good, kind people, and Elodie was a magnificent cook. Philippe decided to have a shave in her honor and take her a bunch of roses.