‘God has nothing to do with it. It’s me; it’s between me and myself. A fight to the death, and you know it.’
Frank removed the phone from his ear and watched his finger in the dark as he pressed the button and ended the call. He raised his eyes towards his naked body reflected in the large bathroom mirror. Bare feet on the cold marble floor, muscular legs, then all the way up to the dull eyes and back down to examine his chest and the red scars crisscrossing it. Almost of its own accord, his right hand rose slowly to brush over them. He sat there, freely allowing the little piece of death he constantly carried inside to wash over him.
When he had awoken, Harriet’s face was the first thing he had seen. Then, Cooper’s face had emerged from the mist. When he had managed to focus on the room, he had seen Homer Woods sitting impassively on an armchair in front of the bed, his hair brushed back, his blue eyes watching without expression behind his gold-rimmed glasses.
He had turned his head to his wife and realized as if in a dream that he was in a hospital room with green light filtering through the Venetian blinds, a bouquet of flowers on the table, tubes coming out of his arm, the monotonous bleep of a monitor, and everything spinning around. Harriet had approached him, bringing her face close to his. She had put a hand on his forehead. He had felt her hand but couldn’t hear what she was saying because once again he’d plunged back to where he had been.
When he had finally come to and was able to talk and think, Homer Woods was standing next to Harriet. Cooper was not there.
The light in the room had changed but it was still, or once again, daytime. Frank had wondered how long it had been since he had last awoken and whether or not Homer had been there all that time. He was wearing the same clothes, the same expression. Frank had realized that he had never seen him with different clothes or different expressions. Maybe he had an entire closet full of identical ones. They called him ‘Husky’ in the office, because his steely blue eyes looked like those of a sled dog.
‘Hi, sweetheart. Welcome back,’ Harriet had said with her hands in his hair and a tear running down her face. That tear was part of her, as if it had been there since the beginning of time.
She had risen from her seat next to the bed and placed her lips on his in a salty kiss. Frank had breathed in the scent of her breath the way a sailor breathes the air that carries the fragrance of the coast, the air of home. Homer had discreetly moved away.
‘What happened? Where am I?’ Frank had asked in a toneless voice that he didn’t recognize. His throat was strangely sore and he remembered nothing. His last memory was of a door being kicked open and of holding his gun as he entered a room. Then came the flash and the thunder and an enormous hand pushing him upwards, towards a painless darkness.
‘You’re in the hospital. You’ve been in a coma for a week. You had us worried sick.’ The tear was melded on to his wife s cheek like a fold in her skin. It sparkled with her pain.
She was standing to one side and had glanced at Homer to let him do the rest of the explaining. He had come over to the bed and looked at Frank from behind the barrier of his glasses.
‘The two Larkins spread a rumour that there was a big deal about to happen, and that they were going to be exchanging the goods and the money with their contacts at the warehouse. Lots of goods and lots of money. They did it on purpose to get Harvey Lupe and his men jealous and convince them to break in and get their hands on everything: drugs and cash. The building was stuffed with explosives. With one show of fireworks they were planning to free themselves of all the competition. But you and Cooper came along instead of Lupe. He was still outside the south side of the warehouse when you went in through the office. In Cooper’s direction the blast was partly absorbed by the shelves inside and all he got was a little debris in his face and a few scratches. You got hit with the full force of the explosion and it’s lucky for you that the Larkins are big dealers but lousy bombers. It’s a miracle you’re alive. I can’t even tell you off for not waiting for the team. If you had all gone in there together it would have been a massacre.’
Now he knew it all but still could remember nothing. All he could think was that he and Cooper had worked for two years to get the Larkins and instead the Larkins had got them. Him, to be precise.
‘What’s wrong with me?’ Frank had asked, sensing some strangeness in his body. He felt a vague constriction and saw his right leg in a cast, as if it belonged to someone else.
A doctor had entered the room just in time to hear the question, and he had given the answer. The doctor’s hair was grey but his face and manner were those of a young man. He had smiled at Frank ceremoniously, his head to one side.
‘Hello, I’m Dr Foster, one of the reasons you’re still alive. Hope you don’t mind. If you like, I can tell you what’s wrong. A few broken ribs, a lesion of the pleura, a leg broken in two places, wounds of various sizes everywhere, serious injuries of the thorax, and a concussion. And enough bruises to make your skin three shades darker. And there is – that is, there was – a piece of metal that stopped a quarter of an inch from your heart and made us sweat blood to get rid of it before it got rid of you. And now, if you will allow me’-he picked up the chart hanging at the foot of the bed – I think it’s time to examine our efforts at damage control.’ He had gone to the head of the bed and pressed a button, near enough for Frank to smell his freshly laundered shirt.
Harriet and Homer Woods had started towards the door, opening it just in time to let in a nurse pushing a trolley. As she was leaving, Harriet had thrown a strange glance at the monitor checking her husband’s heart, as though she thought her presence was necessary for both his heart and the machine to work. Then she had turned away and closed the door behind her.
As the doctor and nurse bustled around his body covered with bandages and tubes, Frank had asked for a mirror. Without a word, the nurse had taken one hanging near the door and handed it to him. What he saw in the mirror, strangely without emotion, were the pale face and suffering eyes of Frank Ottobre, FBI special agent, still alive.
Mirror to mirror, eye to eye. The present overlapped with the past and Frank met his own eyes once again in the big bathroom mirror and asked himself if it had really been worth it for all those doctors to work so hard just to keep him around.
He went back into the bedroom and turned on the light. He pressed a button beside the bed to open the electric shutters. They parted with a hum, mixing sunlight with the electric light.
Frank went over to the window, pushed aside the curtains, pulled the handle of the sliding door, and softly opened it. He went out on the terrace.
Monte Carlo, paved with gold and indifference, lay below. Before him, under the rising sun, down at the end of the world, the blue sea mirrored the azure sky. He thought back to his conversation with Cooper. His country was at war on the other side of that sea. A war that involved him and those like him. A war that concerned everyone who wanted to live without shadows or fear in the sunlight. And he should be there, defending that world and those people.
There was a time when he would have gone, when he would have been on the front line like Cooper, Homer Woods and all the others. But that time was over. He had almost given his life for his country and his scars were the proof.
And Harriet . . .
A gust of fresh air made him shudder. He realized that he was still naked. As he went back inside, he wondered what the world could still do with Frank Ottobre, FBI special agent, when he didn’t even know what to do with himself.
SIX
As he got out of the car, police inspector Nicolas Hulot of the Sûreté Publique of the Principality of Monaco saw the yacht wedged in between the other two, slightly listing to one side. He walked over to the wharf. Sergeant Morelli came towards him, down the gangway of the Baglietto that had been rammed. When they were face-to-face, the inspector was shocked to see that the other man was extremely upset. Morelli was an excellent policeman, who had even trained with Mossad, the Israeli secret service. He had s
een all kinds of horrors. But he was pale and avoided Hulot’s eyes as they spoke, as though what was happening were his fault.
‘Well, Morelli?’
‘Inspector, it was a massacre. I’ve never seen anything like it.’ He sighed deeply and Hulot thought for a moment that he was about to vomit.
‘Calm down, Claude, and explain. What do you mean “massacre”? They told me there was a homicide.’
‘Two, inspector. A man and a woman. What’s left of them, anyway.’
Inspector Hulot turned around and looked at the crowd forming behind the police barricades. He had a sinking sense of foreboding. The Principality of Monaco was not a place where this kind of thing happened. The police force was one of the most efficient in the world and the low crime rate was an Interior Minister’s dream. There was a policeman for every sixty inhabitants and CCTV everywhere. Everything was under control. Men got rich or went bankrupt here, but nobody was killed. There were no robberies, no murders, no organized crime. In Monte Carlo, by definition, nothing ever happened.
Morelli pointed to a man of about thirty who was sitting at an outdoor cafe with a policeman and the medical examiner’s assistant. The place, usually swarming with people in designer clothes, was half empty. Anyone who could be useful as a witness had been detained, and anyone else was denied access. The owner was sitting on the doorstep next to a busty waitress, twisting his hands nervously.
‘That guy was on the Baglietto, the yacht that got hit. His name’s Roger something or other. He went on board to confront someone about the collision. He didn’t see anyone on deck so he went down below and found them. He’s in shock and they’re trying to get something out of him. Agent Delmore – he’s new – went on to the boat after he did. He’s in the car now. Not feeling so hot.’
The inspector turned back again to look at the curious crowd gathered between the police and Boulevard Albert Premier, where a team of workers had just finished dismantling the stands set up for the Grand Prix. He missed the bedlam of the event, the crowds and the inconvenience it always brought.
‘Let’s go see.’
They walked down the unsteady gangway of the Baglietto and then on to the Beneteau via another gangway that had been set up. As the inspector climbed on to the boat, he saw the rudder blocked with the hook and the trail of dried blood that started on deck and continued below where it was lost in darkness. The sun was warm but he felt the tips of his fingers grow suddenly cold. What the hell had happened on that boat?
‘If you don’t mind, inspector,’ said Morelli, pointing to the steps leading to the cabin below, ‘I’ll wait here. Once was more than enough.’
Going down the wooden steps, Inspector Hulot nearly bumped into Dr Lassalle, the medical examiner, who was leaving. He had a cushy job in the Principality and extremely limited experience. Hulot had no respect for him whatsoever, as a man or as a physician. He had got the job because of his wife’s connections and he enjoyed life while doing almost none of the work he was paid to do. Hulot had always thought of him as a luxury doctor. His presence there simply meant that he was the only person around at the time.
‘Good morning, Dr Lassalle.’
‘Ah, good morning, inspector.’ The doctor seemed relieved to see him. It was clear that he was facing a situation he couldn’t handle.
‘Where are the bodies?’
‘In there. Come and see.’
Now that his eyes were accustomed to the gloom, the inspector saw the trail of blood that continued along the floor and disappeared through an open door. To his right, there was a table where someone had written something in blood.
I kill . . .
Hulot felt his hands turn to ice. He forced himself to breathe deeply through his nose. He was hit by the sweetish smell of blood and death, odours that bring anguish and flies.
He followed the trail of blood and went into the cabin on the left. When he was at the door and could see what was inside, the ice in his hands spread through his entire body. Lying on the bed, one next to the other, were the bodies of a man and a woman, completely naked. The woman had no apparent wounds, while there was a large red blotch on the man’s chest at his heart, where the blood had stained the sheet. There was blood everywhere. It seemed impossible that those two lifeless bodies had contained so much blood. The inspector forced himself to look at the faces of the corpses. But their faces were no longer there. The murderer had completely removed the skin, hair included – the way one skins an animal. He stared, sickened by the wide-open eyes, gazing at a ceiling they could not see, the muscles of each face red with dried blood, the teeth exposed in a macabre smile that the absence of lips made eternal.
Hulot felt as though his life would stop there, that he would be standing near the door of the cabin staring at that spectacle of horror and death for ever. For an instant he prayed that the person capable of that slaughter had at least put his victims to death first, before inflicting that torture on them.
He made an effort to shake himself and turned towards the galley, where Lassalle was waiting. Morelli had finally managed to come back down and was there, too. He was standing in front of the doctor, searching the inspector’s face to see his reaction.
First, Hulot turned to the physician. ‘What can you tell me, doctor?’
Lassalle shrugged. ‘The deaths occurred a few hours ago. Rigor mortis has just set in. Hypostatic testing will confirm that. The man was apparently killed with some kind of knife; a sharp thrust right to the heart. As for the woman, apart from’ – the doctor paused to swallow his saliva – ‘apart from the mutilation, there is nothing, at least in front. I haven’t moved the bodies because we’re waiting for forensics. The autopsies should tell us more.’
‘Do we know who they are?’
‘According to the ship’s papers,’ said Morelli, ‘the yacht is the property of a Monte Carlo company. We haven’t done a thorough search yet.’
‘Forensics is going to be furious. With all the people coming and going on this boat, the evidence is contaminated and who knows what we’ve lost.’ Hulot looked at the floor and the trail of blood. Here and there were footprints he hadn’t noticed earlier. When he turned his gaze to the table, he was surprised to realize that he was doing so in the absurd hope that those desperate words would no longer be there.
He heard two voices from the deck above. He climbed up the steps and suddenly found himself in another world, of sunlight and life, of fresh salt air, without the smell of death he had been breathing below. An agent standing on deck was trying to hold back a man of about forty-five who was shouting in French with a strong German accent. The man was trying with all his might to get past the policeman.
‘Let me through, I said!’
‘You can’t. It’s not allowed. Nobody is allowed through.’
‘I have to get in there, I tell you. I have to know what happened.’ The man struggled to shrug off the policeman who was holding his arms. He was red in the face and hysterical.
‘I’m sorry, inspector,’ said the policeman, looking at his superior with relief. ‘We couldn’t stop him.’
Hulot nodded to say that it was all right and the policeman let go. The man straightened his clothes with a gesture of annoyance and approached the inspector as if he were someone he could finally address as an equal. He stopped and removed his sunglasses to look him straight in the eye. ‘Good morning, inspector. Would you kindly tell me what is going on here on this boat?’
‘And may I know to whom I have the pleasure of speaking?’
‘My name is Roland Shatz and I assure you that it’s a name that means something. I am a friend of the owner of this boat. I demand an answer.’
‘Mr Shatz, my name is Hulot and it probably means much less than yours, but I’m a police inspector, which means, that until otherwise informed, I am the person who asks the questions and demands the answers on this boat.’
Hulot clearly saw the anger rise in Shatz’s eyes. The man took a step closer and lowered his
voice slightly.
‘Inspector,’ he whispered, just a few inches from the other man’s face. There was infinite contempt in his voice. ‘This boat belongs to Jochen Welder, twice Formula 1 world champion, and I’m his manager and personal friend. I am also a personal friend of His Highness, Prince Albert. So will you please tell me in detail exactly what has happened on this boat and to the people on it?’
Hulot left those words suspended between them for a moment. Then, his hand shot out with lightning speed and he grabbed Shatz by the knot of his tie, pulling it until he couldn’t breathe. The man’s face turned purple.
‘You want to know? Okay, I’ll make you happy. Come with me and I’ll show you what happened on this boat.’
He was furious. He pulled violently at the manager and practically dragged him below deck.
‘All right, my personal friend of Prince Albert. Come and see with your own eyes what happened.’
He stopped at the door of the cabin and finally let Shatz go. He waved his hand at the two bodies on the bed.
‘Look!’
Roland Shatz regained his breath, and then lost it again. As the reality of the scene before him began to sink in, his face grew deathly pale. The whites of his eyes flashed in the dim light and then he fainted.
SEVEN
As he walked towards the port, Frank saw a group of people watching police cars and uniformed men work their way among the boats moored along the quay. He heard a siren approaching behind him and he slowed his step. All those police meant that something more than a mere boating accident had occurred.
And then there were the reporters. Frank had too much experience not to recognize them at first sight. They were wandering around, sniffing out news with a frenzy only caused by something big. The siren, far away at first like a premonition, now wailed ever closer.
Two police cars raced along the coast from the Rascasse, pulling up in front of the barricades. A policeman hurried over to let them through. The cars stopped behind the ambulance, its back doors open like the jaws of a beast ready to swallow its prey.