City of War (49 page)

I turned to Julien, who was driving with one hand and smoking a cigarette with the other. “It’s none of my business, but what’s your connection to the Hotel Eden?”

He flicked ashes out the window. “The night of the explosion, an agent in our office, Nicole Rolatte, had some contracts for Lazzaro Santagatta to sign. He was buying an apartment in Bonifacio…for his mistress. Nicole got busy, so she sent her daughter to the hotel with the paperwork…Christelle was fifteen.”

He paused and lit another cigarette from the butt of the one he was smoking. “A week later, Nicole hanged herself, and the media couldn’t get enough of the story. I gave an interview to French television that our friends on the mountain evidently didn’t like.”

I took one of Julien’s cigarettes, a British Carlton, lit it and rolled down my window. The cool air rushed in. It felt good. We had just turned onto the coast road, and the lights of the boats dotted the harbor below. I thought of Julien’s description of the hotel’s explosion. Poof. Not much of a word for what it could do to people’s lives.

The following morning, I sent Eddie back to Bastia for the plane. Julien knew a guy named Hugo who ran a skydiving club, and the members had cut an outlaw landing strip out of the scrub northeast of Bonifacio. Hugo said we could park the Cirrus there as long as we let his brother-in-law refuel it. After he explained the brother-in-law worked for Air France, it didn’t take long to understand why or to calculate the profit margin.

Then Julien and I took one of the Aquascans and headed to Marseilles to do some shopping. It also gave us time to work out a plan.

40

Absinthe and Funeral Barges

I don’t like 9mm’s. I use them when I have to because they’re the crabgrass of handguns, and you can find ammo in any cabbie’s ashtray. But like in Washington, going up against professionals is like walking your pet in a bad part of town. You want a pit bull, not a chipmunk. The name of the game is stopping power, and my pit bull of choice is a .45. Nines are also contraindicated for hyenas.

So while Julien took a taxi to the Legion town of Aubagne, I walked to a formerly seedy neighborhood near the Old Port of Marseilles where fond memories were few and far between. The restaurants were nicer than I remembered, and some of the bars were on the verge of becoming trendy. I stopped at a place with newly installed white tile and polished brass and paid the bartender twice what a bottle of absinthe should have cost. Just so I wouldn’t forget I was in France, he took my money and tip without eye contact or a thank-you.

Rue de la Trinidad was right where I’d left it, a tiny alley that still reeked of garbage and excrement and where the buildings hadn’t changed in two centuries of neglect. Number 4 was the same shade of worn institutional green,
and I climbed the stairs to the third floor, stepping over broken glass and things I didn’t care to examine.

Apartment B was in the rear, the worn
mezuzah
on the doorjamb where it had always been. I knocked twice sharply, then twice again followed by three more. Nothing happened, and I repeated it, only this time changing the code by adding one knock. I heard someone moving inside, and I stepped to the side away from the hinges. If Mayer Luzzé still lived here, I didn’t expect him to come out shooting, but he was as paranoid in his own way as Benny Joe, and not always as predictable.

“Qui?”
a rough voice asked from behind the door, the Israeli accent discernable even from the single syllable.

“I have a bottle of Roquette 1797 that I can’t drink by myself,” I said in English.

I heard a chain disengage, the dead bolt turn, and the door opened a crack. I waited, and when nothing else happened, I pushed on the heavy wood, and it swung all the way in.

The apartment was as cluttered as I remembered it, but Mayer’s tools were laid out on his workbench in perfect order. He was working on some kind of exotic pistol with an overly long barrel, but I knew better than to ask. Gunmakers are like diamond cutters—compulsive, secretive and with limited social graces. Now in his late seventies and still not needing glasses, he returned to his work without speaking.

I found a pair of small snifters in the kitchen and poured each of us two fingers of green liquid, then returned to the living room and handed Mayer his. “I expected you to be digging clams in Jaffa by now.”

“Too many old Jews,” he said, holding up his glass. “And I can’t get this.” He took a long swallow and closed his eyes, letting the sharp heat of the absinthe wash over him. I left him and walked through each of the four rooms, opening closets as I went. We were alone, as expected.

“Still careful at all the wrong times.”

I waved a cat off the only other chair in the living room and sat. “Every now and then I get one right.”

“That’s too bad. Most people think you’re a pain in the ass. What do you want?”

“Three .45s…Colts preferably…with suppressors…and some information.”

“Two thousand each, and if you try to negotiate, three. But no suppressors. Market’s gone. People just use a plastic bottle and throw it away. World’s gone to shit.”

“Euros or dollars?”

“Fuck euros. Propped-up tourist money. See how far out of town you get with a suitcase full of that shit if Hitler comes back.”

“You know something no one else does?”

“You looked around lately? How long do you think before somebody says, ‘Enough with these fuckin’ Arab, and while we’re at it, let’s finish the job on their fuckin’ cousins.’”

He gestured with his empty glass, and I got up to get the bottle. He took another draw, then looked at me. “What kind of information?”

“Remi Terranova.”

“He works for that cocksucker Gaetano Bruzzi. Why aren’t you asking about him?”

“What’s to know? He’s rich, so he’s lazy. Terranova will be the problem.”

Mayer thought it over. “He uses that army of kids to terrorize anybody who crosses him. You don’t kill them first, they’ll cut you and just keep cutting.”

“Somebody else told me the same thing.”

“Then listen. You’ve got a soft streak in you. Like you read the Bible and remembered the wrong parts.”

“And Remi?”

“Doesn’t lose his composure. You’ll be a good match…if you get to him.”

We drank in silence for a while, and I saw the cat eyeing me from under the workbench, probably wondering when he was going to get his chair back.

Mayer finally spoke. “The police’ll want to give you a key to the city.”

“I’ll make sure you get the credit.”

“Fuck keys. I only take cash.”

“American.”

“Better than gold. Never a question.” He pointed to his glass.

Julien had done his job. Three sets of black commando gear, an Alpine package, and night-vision goggles, compliments of a GIGN counterterrorist unit commander looking to retire. “I can get him a job handling security for our high-end properties, like the one you’re staying in,” Julien explained. “And I gave him a thousand dollars to take his team out to dinner. These guys have people’s lives in their hands, and they get paid less than street sweepers. I hope you don’t mind.”

It isn’t limited to France. I’d have probably given him more.

Our last stop was the Musée d’Histoire du Marseille. I wanted to see if I could find something about the Fortress of Apollonica that might show a floor plan. We got lucky. A few years earlier, the museum had commissioned a photographic team to document Corsican places of worship. Technically, the fortress didn’t qualify, but the team’s leader had managed to wrangle his way inside anyway, and Bruzzi himself had shown them around.

The results were more than I could have hoped for. Hundreds of high-quality black-and-white photographs taken from every conceivable angle. Since the museum had a no-copy policy, we commandeered a table and began constructing a photographic schematic, and after a couple of hours of working with the images, we felt we had a good enough mental picture to get around. The only thing they had not gotten—either by Bruzzi mandate or photographer omission—was a shot of the monitoring station for the security system.

And so, just before dawn on Saturday, with everything stowed in waterproof seabags, we boarded the Aquascans
and ran southeast through the Strait of Bonifacio. An hour later, Julien, who was alone in the lead boat, indicated that we were inside Italian waters, and we cruised another half hour until there were no other vessels visible. Using empty wine bottles we’d brought from the villa, it took us only a short time to sight in and get used to the feel of the .45s. Then we headed for Sardinia.

The Maddalena Archipelago on the northeast coast is accessible only by boat, but unlike their sour, wary Corsican neighbors, Sardinians are as warm as a Brooklyn wedding party. We put in at a pink sand beach, and a pair of smiling young men in their twenties waded out and took our boats. I was concerned about leaving our things aboard, especially the guns, but Julien said that theft wasn’t a problem in the marina and the tip he promised the men would turn them into better security guards than the police.

We ate a huge breakfast of eggs, sliced lamb, fresh fruit and yogurt at a small sidewalk restaurant run by a beyond-friendly family named Cavalli, who kept bringing out more platters no matter how much we protested. Finally, we just had to get up from the table, exchange forty handshakes and kisses and leave.

Julien knew of a neatly kept tourist hotel on the beach, and after paying cash for three rooms, I changed and took a hard swim in the warm, calm water. Afterward, we sat in comfortable chairs under a cork tree and went over the plan one more time. Then we turned in and slept until late afternoon.

An hour before sundown, Napoleon’s funeral barge rounded the protruding isthmus on Corsica’s east coast sixty miles north of Bonifacio. Turning west into the mouth of the gorge, it fought its way past the foam of river meeting sea, the life-sized replica of the general’s coffin riding high abovedecks and draped with his personal flag. A six-man, period-uniformed honor guard rode with the bier, one man standing at each corner, the others at the bow and stern.

Behind the barge came a flotilla of private vessels keeping a respectful distance but filled with partiers on their way to the festival. Some of the larger boats were strung with lights, while attractive young ladies caught the last rays of the Mediterranean sun. The decks of others were so dangerously full that they looked like entire neighborhoods were aboard. Regardless of the size of the party, however, alcohol was in plentiful supply, and a cacophony of music drifted across the water.

We were laying about a mile to the north in the Aquascans, watching through binoculars, and when the last of the parade disappeared upriver, we started our engines and followed. When we entered the gorge, the darkening 150-foot rock walls loomed over us, bouncing back the rumble of the big Mercs. I calculated that in a little less than two hours, the moon would be directly overhead. If we were lucky, we wouldn’t be around to see it.

It was eleven miles from the mouth of the river to Apollonica, and we lagged well behind the other boats. Julien, riding only a few feet off our port side, called over, “A pair of police cruisers will be patrolling to make sure no one gets too close to the fireworks, but they’ll be drinking too, and their boats are old and slow.”

Forty minutes later, we rounded a bend, and suddenly the Roman bridge came into view. It was even more impressive from the water, only now, lining it and the cliffs on both sides of the river, stood hundreds of men, women and children, quietly watching the mythical drama of Napoleon’s homecoming unfold. Along with the other boats, we cut our engines and drifted. The only sounds now were the low thump of the barge’s inboard and the gentle rush of water against hulls.

With the sun low, it was difficult to see the faces of the onlookers, only their silhouettes. I thought of the terra-cotta soldiers at Xian. Though these Corsican sentinels were playing out a living drama, both were serving rulers whose only contribution now was to remind them of what they no
longer had. It was hard not to appreciate both the irony of the moment and its theatricality.

Eddie didn’t share the wonder. “Gives me the fuckin’ creeps,” he whispered. “All this make-believe bullshit.”

“This from a guy whose people tell fortunes from chicken guts,” I said.

Julien didn’t quite grasp what I meant, but he thought it was funny.

The barge swung toward shore, and we now saw a priest and two dozen men, also dressed in period, standing along the river. One of the deckhands threw out a line, and the men eased the barge in. It took some time to get the coffin of-floaded, but as soon as it was hoisted onto strong shoulders, the slow trek up the steep path to Apollonica began.

We had drifted backward with the current, separating us from Julien. Now he throttled back to us. “Once they get to the square, there’ll be a speech by the mayor followed by a mass written specifically for Napoleon. At its close, the priest will lead the descendants of Octave LeDucq to the coffin to place violets on it. That’ll be the signal to crack open the wine, sing ‘Regina Salvo’ a couple of times and head back to the river.”

“And that will take ninety minutes,” I said, confirming.

“Maybe a little less. If the crowd gets restless, the priest will cut it short. He knows everybody’s there for the party, not to listen to him.”

“Then he’d be the first,” said Eddie. “My money’s on the ninety.”

We brought our boats to speed and drove past the funeral barge. I saw no one onboard. The captain and crew must have gone up too. Across the river, another long, low shape sat at anchor. The fireworks barge. According to Julien, it would be attended by at least two technicians, but if they were there, they weren’t out where I could see them.

Two miles further upriver, we came to the road we’d passed a few days earlier. Unpaved, it descended steeply from the top of the ridge and looked too narrow for anything
wider than a golf cart. However, the two red Pinzgauers were parked along the water, so unless they’d flown in, they fit.