Diamondhead (25 page)
Authors: Patrick Robinson
Tags: #Suspense, #Fiction, #Political, #Thrillers, #Weapons industry, #War & Military, #Assassination, #Iraq War; 2003-
“Well, bring the damn thing here, will you?” he rasped. “And then get out.”
Claudette walked slowly back to her husband and handed him the phone. He snatched it rudely and repeated, “Get out.”
His wife left the room, and Foche almost shouted, “I told you to get rid of that car—not have it all over the national news! Jesus Christ!”
Marcel, however, was no pushover. His actual words were, “Well, how the hell was I to know the stupid deer would find the fucking thing? I drove it into the swamp, damn near drowned myself and Raymond, somehow blew the bastard sky-high, and now you want me to act like a fucking part-time deer guard. For Christ’s sake, sir. Be reasonable.”
Henri Foche knew he had to be careful with Marcel, who knew his misdeeds even more thoroughly than his wife did. “But what about the fucking body?” he demanded. “Where’s that?”
“In the foundation of that new shopping center about fifty miles east of Orléans. Buried in about a thousand tons of rock-hard concrete.”
“How the hell did you manage that?” asked Foche.
“I got friends,” replied Marcel. “Good friends.”
“Anyone else know?”
“Of course not. I dumped it into the wet concrete. Drove the mechanical digger myself. Then my pal tipped about three truckloads of wet concrete on top of it. He probably guessed a body. But never mentioned it. I waited there until he’d finished the job. Gave him two thousand euros, like you said.”
“Okay, okay. Sounds fine. I just wish they hadn’t found the Benz.”
“Million-to-one chance, boss. Can’t fight that. We just keep our heads down.”
“See you at midday, Marcel.”
“No problem.”
“
Claudette! Where the hell are you?”
Foche’s voice rose in exasperation.
Claudette! Where the hell are you?”
Foche’s voice rose in exasperation.
His wife came in and said, “I’m right here. What do you need?”
“First of all take this damn phone off my breakfast table. Then bring me some fresh coffee. After that I’ll need a legal pad and a pen. And phone Mirabel. Tell her to meet me at the office right after lunch.”
Mirabel, Foche’s fifty-six-year-old secretary, a slim, plain local woman, was perhaps the only woman in Foche’s life whom he had not attempted to undress. Although Claudette would not have put her life savings on that being entirely true.
“Will you be here for lunch?” she asked.
“No. I’m going out, probably locally.”
The young girl he was seeing, Anne-Marie, had a small apartment near the canal, not far from his own home, which was set back behind a redbrick wall in the Les Lices area. They always met in L’Ouvrée restaurant and then walked to her home, from which Marcel collected him around three o’clock.
This weekly procedure was not without its perils. There had been one shuddering occasion when Foche and the girl had almost been caught, walking along rue de la Monnaie, with Claudette approaching on the other side of the street. Henri Foche had never raced into a church with such determination. Even the carved angels on the outer wall of the Cathedrale Saint Pierre looked startled at the sudden appearance of the serial adulterer, murderer, liar, and international arms pariah. But they would look startled: angels have superior insights to the rest of us.
And now Claudette was hot on his trail again. “Who are you seeing and where? I may need to contact you, especially if the police have more questions about Olivier.” She should have known better. If there was one thing Henri Foche could not abide under any circumstances, it was interference with his plans. Particularly from a woman, especially from his wife.
He glanced up and said coldly, “Shut your damn mouth.”
“I don’t think you should speak to me like that anymore,” she said. “I’m entitled to ask questions, and you are in a very vulnerable position politically.”
Anger welled up inside him. No one thwarted Henri Foche, especially on matters involving illicit sex, to which he had been looking forward for several days. He stood up and walked over to her, drew back his right arm across his body, and whipped a backhanded smack right across his wife’s mouth and nose. The blow sent her reeling across the room. She hit the sideboard and slid down the wall next to it, blood pouring down her face, dripping onto her still half-open blouse.
Foche stood looking down at her, fists clenched, as she cowered on the floor, sobbing and turning away from him. He lifted up his highly polished Gucci right foot and slammed a kick hard into her perfectly formed backside. “Remember,” he said, “I am Henri Foche, the next president of France. You are a partially reformed Saint-Germain whore. If I were you, I would not forget that.” With that, he walked back into his study.
It was not the first time he had hit her. But this was very bad. Claudette had been brought up on the wrong side of the tracks, the product of a baker’s assistant and a violent dockworker who regularly beat her mother.
Madame Foche had not arrived at the gates of the Elysée Palace, as it were, by some kind of a fluke. She had been a calculating and careful hooker, very beautiful, very selective, with a high-class clientele. Like most members of her trade, she had a powerful instinct to fight back when threatened. She stood up and walked into the kitchen and selected a serrated bread knife made by Sabatier. She was shaking with rage, pain, and humiliation.
She walked into his study and said, very softly, “Henri, if you ever hit me again, I swear to God I will kill you. With this. I know what you are, and I know I am in danger. But you are a vicious bastard, and you deserve to die. And you won’t find me as easy to get rid of as poor Olivier Marchant.”
Foche looked up. His eyes narrowed. “Just so long as you remember your place in this world, there will be no more trouble. Step out of line again, and you will regret it. I have bigger things on my mind than you. So get out and stay out.”
Claudette left the room, slamming the door so hard the eighteenth-century house shook on its foundations. She retreated into her bathroom to repair her cut lip and still-bleeding nose. Her display of bravado had left her unaccountably exhausted. She was afraid of her husband, and always had been.
She had seen some of his friends. She was aware of the reliance he placed on those two thugs, Marcel and Raymond. She not only believed he was capable of murder, she believed he had committed murder, and would not hesitate to murder her if he felt that was necessary.
Her dilemma was twofold. If she ran, Foche would hunt her down and have her eliminated, simply because she may prove a danger to him. No one would ever know what had become of her. Third wives elicit little sympathy. But if she stayed, that would be a different form of hell: a world of constant humiliation, sexual demands, fear, and the ever-present knowledge that her husband was in bed with another woman. She had long ceased to love him, or even care about him. But Claudette had some pride, and she did not consider herself worthless, just a sex object for a cruel and sneering husband. She thought she had value and a worthwhile mind. She sat on the bathroom chair and wept tears of pure helplessness.
She was a prisoner here in this perfect French provincial house, a captive of a truly bad person, and there was nothing she could do. Claudette understood she had not, by any means, led a blameless life, but she had been a good wife, and like many other people around the world, she fervently wished her husband dead.
She was not comforted by the prospect of becoming a twenty-first-century Queen Marie Antoinette, living similarly in the Elysée Palace in Paris, afforded every human luxury the French taxpayers’ money could buy. Today she felt more like Marie Antoinette on October 16, 1793, trapped in her tiny cell in the Conciergerie, preparing herself to face the guillotine.
She heard her husband leave and debated the fairly simple possibility of having him followed and building a case for divorce on the grounds of his perpetual adultery. But for what? To end up like Olivier Marchant, wherever he may be?
Mack Bedford decided to walk up to the shipyard for a final chat with Harry before they made their decision. He walked through the little town, occasionally stopping for a chat with local people he had known almost all of his life. But when he reached the big iron gates of Remsons Shipbuilding he saw what he thought might be a riot meeting. And in the middle of a throng of maybe a hundred men stood the proprietor of the yard.
Mack jostled through the crowd and stood next to Harry, who told him, loud enough for all to hear, “Hi, Mack, you find me on probably the worst day of my life. I have just laid off my principal steelworkers. There is no more work here for them, and I doubt there’s going to be.”
Judd Powell stood on the other side of Harry. He called out, “Guys, you know if there were any prospect of jobs, the boss would never have let you go. But all over the Western world the militaries are cutting back. Less ships are being built everywhere except Russia and the Far East. That may change, but it may take five years, and Mr. Remson obviously cannot fund a fifty-million-dollar-a-year wage bill until then.”
“But what are we gonna do, Judd?” “We got wives, families, mortgages—what now?” “This is all we know—and no one’s been hired up the road at Bath for two years.” “There’s nothing else here. . . . Are you saying we have to leave the town, move somewhere else?” “What about our kids, schools, grades, and everything else?”
The questions rained in on Harry Remson and his foreman. It was nothing short of grief. As if someone had died. These hardworking men, men who came in and cut steel at seven on the coldest mornings. They were men who worked high on the hulls of these warships, forcing the cold steel into position. They were men upon whom the worldwide reputation of Remsons had been built. Men with wide shoulders, enormous strength, and a work ethic that would have made a New York longshoreman blanch.
They understood, albeit remotely, that Harry Remson and his family could not go on supporting them indefinitely if there was no work. But they could not rid themselves of the feeling they were somehow being cast out. Unfairly. Undeservingly. Unnecessarily. And now they had to go home and inform their wives they had been laid off and from now on they were officially unemployed. Just a government statistic, reporting to the benefit office in Bath every week, just to try to sustain family life. In some lessened form.
Most of these steelworkers were used to furnishing their homes, exchanging their automobiles, and buying new wardrobes for the entire family when the generous triannual Remson bonuses were paid out, upon completion of the French frigates. And all of them knew they were about to feel a financial draft in every possible sense, with rocketing winter fuel bills in one of the harshest climates in North America. A few of them, in the last riven hours, had already contemplated moving away, becoming strangers in a strange new place, perhaps somewhere warmer, where life might be less expensive.
For the steel men the loss of work coincided with a shattering loss of face. Because they alone form the bedrock of the workforce. The word “steel” has an extra connotation in the shipbuilding industry. No one states, “Work is about to begin on a new warship” or “Remsons expects to get moving next month on the new order.” The phrase is traditional, and it appears in all naval lists of newly built warships: “First steel cut X months before the keel is laid.”
And here they stood, one hundred men, each one of them with a lump in his throat, facing the day they thought would never come, facing the fact that their brutal hard work down the years had, in the end, meant nothing.
Harry Remson knew how they felt. He had been on the phone to his own father for two hours that morning, and the old man, eighty-six years old now and stubborn to the end, had started and finished the long conversation with the same sentence: “Son, you gotta do what’s right for the guys. Don’t give up. Please don’t give up. It’s your duty to save them and the shipyard. Give it one more try. See if you can pull something off.”
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