The Martyr’s Curse

Chapter Twenty-Three

Briançon was a pleasant, polite, civilised town. Far too much of all those things to attract the kind of people Ben needed to find next, and for the kind of further enquiries he needed to press on with. Pleasant, polite, civilised people couldn’t help him in his quest.

And so Ben had pictured a map in his head, with Briançon marking its imaginary centre, and started thinking of where he might begin looking for less pleasant people who could. Four hours’ drive to the south lay the deceptively named city of Nice, a place whose darker side Ben wasn’t unacquainted with. Once upon a time, its undisputed kingpins had been the Sicilian crime bosses, but nowadays the prostitution and drugs rackets were an open market to any number of ruthless and ambitious hoodlums. If you were looking for a particular class of low life, there were worse places to start turning over rocks and kicking down doors.

But then there was Marseille. About two hundred and fifty kilometres to the south-west on Ben’s mental map, just a little under three hours’ drive from the cosy tranquillity of Briançon. If Nice scored an approximate seven out of ten in the Sin City leagues, then Marseille was way off the scale. An erstwhile haven of sea and sun that had decomposed into a festering lair of organised crime and police corruption. Provence’s own answer to South Central LA, where the litter-swirled streets were pockmarked from repeated drive-by shootings; officially Europe’s most dangerous place to be a young person growing up, and a land of opportunity for the Milieu or French criminal underworld. The days of legendary gangsters like Marseille godfather Jacky ‘The Madman’ Imbert, glamorous figures who’d lived the dream rubbing shoulders with the likes of Alain Delon, were gone. They’d long since been displaced by cut-throat gangs of Corsicans, Turks, Maghrebis, Pieds-Noirs, Senegalese and ethnic Manoush and Yeniche gypsies, all continually disembowelling one another over rights to control arms and drug trafficking, the sex trade, illegal gambling, extortion and protection and murder rackets, money laundering and fraud, arson and theft and, finally but not least, kidnapping.

Human trafficking was the reason Ben had become familiar with the less salubrious districts of Marseille, back in the days when he’d called himself a ‘freelance crisis response consultant’. He didn’t suppose the place was any less of a sanctuary for scumbags than it had been then. In fact, he was fairly certain it was even worse than he remembered, and he had his reasons for thinking that way.

It was well known in certain circles that a fresh team of players had increasingly become established as the new-generation crime bosses of Marseille, and that was what interested him. Walking tall, like lions among the hyenas, the Russian mob now lorded it over the gang scene. Under their rule, the number of bloody turf wars and feud killings and execution-style assassinations had rocketed to unprecedented levels. The Russians had virtually uncontrolled access to a river of illicit weaponry coming out of Eastern Europe, as well as to trained men happy to make use of it. Many of their enforcers were battle-hardened ex-military, tough, beefy, crude and violent men recruited from former Soviet territories like Chechnya and Georgia, for whom the act of murder was so casual and human life so cheap that they scared the crap out of the rest of the Milieu gangs, whose territories they were snapping up one by one.

Nowhere else on Ben’s mental map, within a radius of two hundred and fifty kilometres, a circle ranging one hundred and ninety-six thousand square kilometres in area, would you find anything like such a high concentration of professionally trained and equipped criminals ready to rock ’n’ roll at the drop of a hat. Exactly the kind of people you could expect to carry out a military killing operation against a community of poor innocent monks who just happened to be sitting on a hoard of gold that maybe they didn’t even know about. Exactly the kind of people who might be looking to finance themselves and their organisation through an easy heist against unarmed, defenceless opponents.

Not to mention, exactly the kind of people you might also expect to find smoking Russian cigarettes like the one that had been stubbed out on Père Antoine’s forehead. Ben had tried them once, didn’t much care for them. A particular and distinctive brand that had been manufactured in the Ukraine until 2005, and since then in Russia itself. Considered one of the country’s finer blends, the sophisticated choice of rich Russian society folks, and maybe rich Russian gangsters, too.

All of which made Marseille the top spot on Ben’s mental map. And which was exactly why, at this moment, he was barrelling south-westwards down the motorway towards Marseille in a gleaming dark H1 Hummer. Blasting through the hot afternoon with a cool wind roaring in through the wide-open windows, two hundred thousand euros’ worth of gold weighing down the passenger seat the other side of the massive transmission tunnel, and a couple of automatic rifles plus over five hundred rounds of ammunition stuffed in a holdall in its cavernous rear space. The Hummer was perfect for him. It was fast, it would go absolutely anywhere he wanted it to, and it was big enough to set up a mobile camp in if it came to it. No amount of civilianisation could completely smooth away its military origins. The thing was a battle wagon, aggressively functional in every way, and Ben was grimly at home in it. He settled back inside its armoured shell and kept his foot down and felt as if he was going to war.

The late afternoon was still hot when he came into Marseille. From a distance it was a beautiful city, framed by a backdrop of high country, rock and scrub wilderness that the French called la garrigue. Up close, you could see the decay anywhere you chose to spot it. Ben avoided the bustle of the centre and picked his way around the outskirts, navigating from memory to a place he’d been before and hadn’t ever been too eager to revisit. The area he was aiming for was a stretch of districts to the north of the city, a sprawling zone of neglected apartment blocks that had been knocked up cheaply and never knocked down, but should have been a long time ago. Isolated, almost self-contained, the area was like a city in its own right — one where the normal rules no longer applied.

Specifically, Ben was headed for a district called La Castellane. It was a close-knit cluster of estates hastily erected in the early seventies for a population of itinerant blue-collar workers who’d never been meant to stay, until worsening economic conditions and factory closures had made prisoners of them. In the span of not too many years, the place had become the most notorious ghetto in Marseille. It still was. The Hummer rumbled its way through dismal, colour-washed streets that could have belonged in a Mexican barrio. In some places, he could have imagined himself part of a military patrol threading its way through war-torn Baghdad, 2003. There was rubble everywhere, and now and then the shell of a burned-out vehicle. Any intact wall was covered in graffiti and every lower-floor window was barred like a prison block. Sun-blanched grass grew in patches between derelict buildings and stalled construction projects from ten or fifteen years ago, surrounded by dusty vegetation and the incessant chirping of cicadas. Strings of cars were parked along the streets, most of them white or silver or grey, adding to the impression that the colour had been drained out of the place along with any kind of happiness or hope. Feral packs of olive-tanned shirtless youths roved the streets, yelling and fighting among themselves and chucking things at passing cars.

But not at the Hummer. As Ben cruised by he saw the reaction of the kids, and it didn’t surprise him. In the context of a place like Briançon, Omar’s battle wagon was just an overblown, gas-guzzling folly of a car. But in these mean streets, its menacing appearance and black-tinted glass had a whole other meaning that these kids understood very well. The kind of people who drove about the ghetto in such vehicles were the kind who owned it, ruled it, who collected the money and dictated who lived and who died. Even think about throwing a can or a stone at a car like that and you’d better start running before its occupants casually pulled up, stepped out and mowed down everyone in sight with automatic gunfire. Then they’d hunt down your friends, your family, everyone you’d ever known, and kill them all. It was about respect.

Ben felt sorry for the kids. Many, perhaps most, would get caught up in the drugs scene, if they hadn’t done already, looking for ways to gather easy cash and often catching a bullet or a blade in the belly for their efforts. Life expectancy wasn’t high. He rumbled past another wreck of a burned-out car, and thought about what had happened to it. One of the methods the gangs used to dispense with rivals was to shoot them through the windows of their vehicles and then set them alight. It was called ‘barbecuing’. Guns were everywhere. Rule of law was just a faded memory here.

Ben’s prediction had been more than right. The area’s decline since he’d last seen it was worse than he could have imagined. Then it had been a sinkhole of despair. Now it was just lost, irredeemable. Something had rotted the heart out of the place and it needed to be levelled and the whole thing rebuilt afresh. Except you couldn’t change the people who’d brought about the rot, and they would just keep bringing it until there was nothing left. The only way to change them would be to kill them.

The place had indeed changed, but not so much that Ben couldn’t find his way to his particular destination. The building he was looking for was a five-storey apartment block deep inside the La Castellane estates, filthy and neglected and looking like a penitentiary among the unkempt greenery.

He parked in the shadow of the trees fifty yards from the building’s entrance, killed the engine and settled back in his seat. Watched the entrance from behind his tinted glass, and waited for darkness to fall.