Lost (24 page)

The rain battered the tent, which had begun to leak through the zip.

‘Fucking Go Sport,’ Karim said, touching the drip with his fingers. ‘Cheap shite.’

He had chosen the tent because it was silver and shaped like an igloo; it had not occurred to him that it might rain. Denis was lying beside him in his dead knight position. Karim could feel the damp coming up through the ground-sheet and his bedroll. The end of his sleeping bag was wet through.

‘How can you just lie there?’

‘What do you expect me to do?’ Denis mumbled, keeping his eyes closed.

‘This is fucked. I’m cold.’ He was wearing all the clothes he had brought. He patted the pockets of his tracksuit for his hash. From somewhere within the bedding came the trill of the phone.

‘Quick, where is it?’ He kicked Denis to enliven him and then found the phone nestling between his legs. He composed himself. ‘Hello? The line’s shit.’

‘Are you alone?’

‘Denis is here.’

‘Just Denis?’

‘Yes. Why?’

‘I’m going to give you some instructions and I want you to listen. Don’t answer. Just listen. When I’ve finished you’ll tell me you’ve understood, that’s all. Is that clear?’

‘What is it? What’s going on?’

‘Karim, I said listen.’

‘Sure. I’m listening.’

‘No questions,’ Santini said.

‘Right.’

‘How many of you are there?’ Karim hesitated. He had a bad feeling. ‘I said –’

‘Three.’

‘Okay. I want you out of this,’ Santini said.

‘Fucking right,’ he said.

‘What did I say?’

‘Sorry.’

‘The mother has nine million francs ready and waiting. You’re going to take the nine million. I want this over.’ Karim moaned with relief. ‘I want to talk to whoever’s behind this. You’re going to pass me to the third man and I’m going to get him to accept the ransom.’

Santini paused and Karim listened to the rain beating against the tent; he looked at the dead joint in his fingers. What was he talking about, the third man?

‘Yeah right,’ Karim said.

‘I’m going to get him to take the money. As soon as he leaves to collect it, you call me. Do you understand?’

Karim looked down at Denis, who was lying with his arms behind his head, watching him, relaxed as anything.

‘I’m going to give you a number …’ Santini was saying.

‘Santini, you behind me?’

‘Have I ever let you down, Karim?’

‘Fuck,’ Karim said.

‘The number is –’

‘Wait, wait. I’m going to write it down. Shit.’ Karim was trembling. ‘Denis, you fuckhead. Give us a pen.’

But Denis had no use for pens.

‘Just remember it, Karim.’

‘Yeah, right. What is it? What’s the number?’

‘0609363635.’ Santini’s voice was eerily patient.

The first four digits were the same as his own. He just had to remember 36 twice, then 35.

‘Karim, have you got that?’

‘Yes.’

‘Now where are you?’

‘We’re in a shithole.’

‘Directions, Karim. Come on. I’m going to get you out of this.’

‘Okay. Right.’ Karim looked pleadingly at Denis, just lying there with his hands behind his head. But Denis always followed, so he never had to know where he was going. ‘Drive through Cortizzio and take – what is it? – the left fork. It leads to a rubbish dump, okay? There’s an electricity plant just before it. On the right. Just there you’ll see this track that leads into the woods. It goes down into a kind of valley and then you lose the track and you have to follow the valley upwards.’

‘Wait,’ Santini said. ‘What valley?’

‘Not a valley. It’s like a big ditch in the woods. Shit, Santini. I don’t know the
maquis
;
I’m trying to think. When you follow the path down it leads to a ditch. You follow this ditch up – I mean to the right – follow it for a long way; it’s about half an hour’s walk uphill, then it disappears, I think, and you’re on a hillside. Fuck, I can’t explain.’

‘Just go on.’

Karim kept talking but he did not believe he was making sense.

‘You see a track – it’s a goat track that runs uphill – and you follow that until it runs into a ridge with a steep drop on your right. It’s like a gorge, deep as hell.’

He went on talking into the phone and when Santini didn’t interrupt him he knew he was being recorded. ‘It’s a stone hut with a tree growing through the roof.’

‘How long from Cortizzio?’

‘About forty-five minutes.’

There was a pause.

‘How’s the child?’ Santini asked.

What did Santini care about how the child was? There it was, spelled out for him: police.

‘He’s okay. I suppose.’

Karim saw a room full of cops in leather jackets with big bunches of keys hanging from their belts, the head man holding his finger to his lips, the mother standing there, crying silently, and the tape recorder turning round and round. Karim wondered if Santini had dreamed the whole thing up like this from the start. He was not the kind who got nailed. He must have planned it this way.

‘Call that number as soon as he leaves.’

‘Yeah. Just get me out of this.’

‘I’ll speak to him now. Put him on.’

Santini’s was the only voice Karim had ever heard that carried any authority for him. He climbed out of his sleeping bag and squatted in front of the entrance to the tent.

‘We’re bailing out,’ he said to Denis.

Karim knew the trouble they were in but he did not care at this point. All he cared about was getting out of the
maquis
and back to his car, his flat and his girlfriend, Nadia; seeing her in the bath, painting her toenails, her plump, golden body and all her black hair piled on top of her head.

He brushed the water from his hair and stepped into the hut. Garetta was sitting on the tarpaulin with the radio quacking in his lap. The room smelled of paraffin from the lamp beside him on the floor. The boy was also on the tarpaulin, curled up in a ball in the corner, as far away from Garetta as he could be. Karim took the phone from inside his jacket and handed it to Garetta.

‘Santini.’

Garetta turned off the radio.

‘Why didn’t he call me on my phone?’

Karim shrugged and thrust the mobile at him.

‘He’s waiting.’

Garetta took the phone and held it to his ear, listening suspiciously. He was a caveman.

‘Go on,’ Karim said. ‘Talk to him.’

The boy in the corner was very still.

‘Yes?’ Garetta said.

Karim watched Garetta listening to Santini. His face was gaunt and the skin was grey with stubble. He had thick sacs beneath his eyes. With his long black ringlets he looked like a pirate and this thought cheered Karim up. The rain, dripping through the hole in the roof, collected in a puddle at the base of the tree and flowed in a little stream along the floor, between his legs and out through the door. The smell of paraffin and rain and Garetta and the terrified child made the air thick as a hammam.

Garetta was listening to Santini and keeping quiet. Karim realised it was not necessarily a sign that he was giving in. It looked like mute resistance.

At last Garetta said, ‘Okay, I’ll call you back,’ and then hung up. He contemplated Karim’s phone, then looked up at Karim and then back at his phone.

‘So?’ Karim said.

Garetta put the phone in his pocket.

‘Hey!’ Karim clicked his fingers at him. ‘My phone.’

‘I’m going to call him back,’ Garetta said. ‘I’m going to sleep on it, then call him back.’

‘Use your own phone,’ Karim said.

Garetta folded his arms, making the leather of his filthy Perfecto creak.

‘Give me my phone back, man.’

But Garetta ignored him.

‘My phone, man. Use yours.’ But Karim could hear the defeat in his own voice.

Garetta ignored him. He leaned forward and turned down the paraffin lamp. The room was filled with a dim, hissing light.

‘Shit, man. It’s only six o’clock and it’s already night. What a shithole.’ He could make out Garetta leaning back against the wall, his legs stretched out in front of him, his huge feet resting one on top of the other. Garetta had been in the Legion in the north where a man learned to sleep hanging
upside down from a tree. Karim was in good shape. He exercised enough to be proud of his body, to parade his perfect torso for the women, but he knew that it was cosmetic compared to Garetta. He’d told Santini where he was. Santini was behind him. And Santini equals the whole island, he told himself. He glanced at the bundle in the corner, then turned and went back into the rain.

The rain had ended, leaving no memory behind in the sky, which was a deep, Order of Merit blue. The sun had gone down behind the hills without colour or ceremony. Stuart and Alice sat in the hired Mercedes. They were parked in front of the closed gates to Santarosa’s cemetery, set back from the road and shielded from view by a row of cypress trees on either side of them. They had been waiting there for nearly an hour for Karim to call back with the meeting place.

Further up the road, in the lay-by opposite the petrol station, Gérard was sitting at the wheel of Santini’s Saab. In the back were Joachim and Santini. Paul waited in his car with the other two cops, Mireille and the spotty youth. Fabrice waited in his van in the main square. Stuart told himself that even if he did call Central Office, it was too late to send reinforcements. The last plane from the mainland had already left.

Sitting beside Alice, he could feel her anxiety come and go in waves. She was resting her elbows on the steering wheel of her car. Her lips were pale and she looked weak.

‘Do you want me to drive?’ he asked. ‘I can drive first, then you can take over.’

‘No, no.’

‘Do you want something to drink? Paul always has some whisky in a flask. I’ll get him to bring it.’

‘I’m okay.’

‘Are you sure?’

She nodded and smoothed her face with her hands.

‘Mesguish is good,’ Stuart said. She looked at him. ‘Not as a human being but as a policeman. He is.’

‘Are you convincing yourself?’

‘No. I promise you.’

‘Don’t promise.’

The radio spat and Gérard’s high-pitched tenor cut in and cut out again.

‘You should have let me go,’ she said.

He looked at her. Her remoteness was alarming.

‘I can’t let you go.’

The radio hissed again.

‘Stuart,’ came Gérard’s voice. ‘Channel seven’s no good up here …’

Stuart told him to switch to five and put the scrambler on. He gave the same instructions to the two other cars. Paul’s voice cut in. ‘Pass me Santini,’ Stuart said, cutting him short. He didn’t want any radio banter in front of her.

There was a pause, then came Santini’s baritone.

‘What is it now, Stuart?’

‘Tell me about Denis.’

‘What about him?’

‘Where’s he from?’

‘No idea.’

‘Come on, Santini. What can he do?’

‘Pick locks.’

‘What else?’

‘Nothing. He’s simple. He obeys Karim. That’s it. Now it’s my turn. Are we on air?’

‘No.’

‘Who turned me in?’ Santini asked.

Stuart looked at Alice. He waited.

‘It was Georges Rocca,’ he said at last.

There was a long silence.

‘Bullshit.’

‘Who do you think it is, Santini?’

‘You’re finished, Stuart.’

‘So are you.’

Alice looked away.

‘I bet you my Sig Sauer you’ll be on an early retirement by the end of the year.’

Santini’s solid-silver weapon, the only remnant of his former days. Stuart smiled. He could not help it. There was something satisfying in this talk.

‘What does that mean? If you’re wrong I get your Sig Sauer? What happens if you’re right?’

‘There’s nothing of yours I want,’ Santini said.

‘There’s a big rush to get me buried,’ Stuart said. ‘You could put me in your mausoleum and we could be together till the end of time.’

Alice was watching him. He hung up.

‘You think you’ve got him, don’t you?’

‘It’s not so much that.’ He hesitated. ‘It suddenly seems’ – he looked at her as though she might be able to tell him what it was – ‘childish.’

But she said nothing.

‘Are you all right?’

She nodded slowly. She was very far away. He saw that what he was doing, the operation he was orchestrating, did not concern her. She seemed to be involved in another, far greater matter. He guessed she was praying.

Alice opened her eyes. Stuart was looking at the map on his lap, his face lit by the orange glow of the dashboard. It was now dark outside and there was no moon that she could see. She closed her eyes again. Sam was there, huddled with fear. She had not slept. Her panicking heart had lashed her awake each time she dozed off, She had heard the growing discontent over the radio. It had been a long wait. She opened her eyes again. Stuart had put away the map and was looking at her.

‘What are they doing?’ she asked. ‘Why are they taking so long to call back?’

‘Sleeping maybe.’

‘How can they sleep?’ She rubbed her face. ‘There’s no moon,’ she said, looking out through the windscreen.

‘No. But we’ve got infra red. A good pair made by the
Israelis. We found them in a search. They belonged to the FNL. I never declared them.’ She looked at the hard cut of his profile. ‘Mesguish has them,’ Stuart was saying. ‘He’ll need them tonight.’

She remembered sitting with Mathieu in his car, watching his face like this while he drove. It was early on and they were in Paris and he was taking her to lunch. It was winter and the sky was white and she could feel the cobbles under the wheels. She sat leaning into her door, holding herself away from him, preventing herself from reaching out and touching him. Then suddenly he had turned and smiled at her, a smile full of kindness, and he had pulled over, turned off the engine and kissed her. She had felt overcome with shame because she knew the kiss was a reward.

She looked at Stuart and saw herself leaning towards him. She would make sure he did not feel ashamed. She would kiss his face, his mouth, his neck.

He was looking at her.

‘Without you, none of this works any more,’ he said. ‘I won’t be able to do this.’

She held out her hand. He took it again and held it hard and she closed her eyes. Sam was still lying there waiting. She did not move for fear of losing Stuart’s hand. She felt as though she were being held unequivocally. This was what it was to feel safe.

The radio broke in and she let go.

‘Come in, Stuart. It’s the call. Do you copy? Over.’ She could hear the tremor in Gérard’s voice.

‘We copy. Over.’

They could hear the high-pitched ringing of the mobile phone, the third ring and Santini answering.

Stuart found her hand and held it hard.

‘I understand,’ Santini was saying. ‘The call box in Cortizzio. Fine, but she needs time to get there. Give her an hour. Of course she’ll be alone. I’m not coming. It’s a dark blue Mercedes.’

They could hear someone exhaling, then silence. Stuart let go of her hand.

‘Stuart? Did you get that? Over.’ It was Gérard.

Stuart slammed his hand down on the dashboard.

‘Pass me Santini.’

There was a pause. Stuart took the map from the side pocket.

‘He wants Madame Aron to go …’

‘Fuck you, Santini.’

The radio went dead.

Stuart began to hit the dashboard over and over again. Alice reached out and touched his face. He stopped still and looked at her. Placing his hand over hers on his cheek, he closed his eyes.

‘You’re not going.’

She spoke gently to him. ‘I have to go. It’ll be all right. I promise.’

Gérard came on the line: ‘Stuart. He said he won’t pick up if it’s anyone else. What do we do?’

She put her hand gently over his mouth.

‘You must let me go, Stuart,’ she whispered. She wanted to tell him that she loved him.

Gérard’s voice came again: ‘Stuart?’

Alice took her hand from his mouth. It would not be fair to tell him now. Stuart picked up the radio.

‘Okay, Gérard. Put Santini on.’

‘Fuck you, Stuart.’

‘Yes, all right.’

‘I’m not making the rules.’

‘Of course you are, you liar.’

‘If you’re going to insult me you’re on your own.’

‘Shake your handcuffs, will you, Santini? I want to hear them.’

There was a pause. Alice could hear Santini’s bass growling in the background.

‘Stuart, it’s Gérard. She has to go to the call box in Cortizzio.
There’s only one. At the entrance to the village. When you’re coming from Massaccio it’s after the signpost on the right. She has to wait in the call box and pick up when it rings. He’ll give her instructions.’

Stuart shouted into the radio. ‘Who is it, Santini? I’ll give you one more chance.’

Santini came back: ‘Screw you, Stuart.’

Alice watched Stuart regain control. It occurred to her that this was the kind of person Mathieu had sought to be.

‘Cortizzio’s forty minutes away,’ Stuart was saying. ‘I’m going to send Fabrice and the technician ahead with the van. They can park in the village and wait. I’ll give them a ten-minute start, then we’ll leave. I’m going to get Paul to follow without his headlights. He can take Mireille and her colleague with him. You follow on when I give the signal. When Karim calls, you signal Mesguish straight away. Do you understand? Over.’

There was a hiss, then Gérard said he copied.

Stuart turned and faced her.

‘Ready?’

She nodded, unwilling to look at him for too long and risk weakening. She turned the key in the ignition. Her hands were sweating and her fingers slipped on the key. She tried again and drove slowly over the gravel, stopping at the entrance to the road. Stuart was leaning forward in his seat, talking into the radio. She was aware of his voice, calm and authoritative, the meaning coming to her only sporadically. She tried to breathe slowly and deeply to settle her heart.

‘… Come in, Mesguish. Do you read me? Over. You’re going in with the dogs as soon as I give the signal … All right, everyone, we’re moving.’

The image of Sam was still there in her mind, like a curled fossil.

‘You’re going to drive to Cortizzio,’ Stuart told her. ‘I’m going to duck down. We’ll go slowly. It’s a forty-minute drive from here. You’re going to go to the call box in
Cortizzio
.
You’ll see it on the right as you come into the village. He’ll be watching the call box to make sure you’re alone.’

‘You can’t be in the car. What if he sees?’

‘He won’t. You’re going to drop me off on the way. I’ll tell you when. You’ll pick me up after the call. I’m not letting you go alone.’ His tone was gentle and inexorable.

She looked at his face with all its poignant lines; then he turned and reached into the back. He was checking the bag, which was lying on the back seat. The transmitter was taped to the bottom. He reached up and flicked a switch above the rear-view mirror. ‘So the light doesn’t come on when I open the door.’ He sat back. ‘You’ll be with him soon,’ he said. ‘You’ll get your boy back tonight. Turn right out of here.’