“Well, of course you can refuse, but then you will have certain problems.”
“Such as?” says Harry.
“Well, apart from the undeniable evidence of breaking and entering – perhaps you wanted to get your own back on my daughter… a few priceless artefacts to make up for your loss…”
“But hold on…” Harry again.
“More harmful I think will be the harassment order that my lawyers will take out. You will not be allowed within fifty miles of my presence, and since I spend my weeks in London that might be inconvenient for your business…”
Harry looks at Max. “Can he do that?”
Max shrugs.
“Let me assure you that I can,” says the Saudi, draining what is left of his whisky. “And there are a hundred other ways that I can make your life difficult. Your government goes to great efforts to make sure our life in your country is as comfortable as possible.”
“More importantly, I think for you,” says the Saudi, pointing his tumbler at Harry. “Is the five million. No?”
Harry nods.
“Here’s the deal. You find my daughter, and take a picture with her to prove it, and I’ll drop all charges and leave you alone. Get her to leave with you and away from Rome and I’ll pay you the money you’re owed. I don’t mind how you do it… just do it.”
* * *
“What do you think?” asks Harry as the chauffeur-driven Mercedes glides them back towards London.
“I don’t think we have a choice,” says Max, after a pause.
“In for a penny…”
“In for five million quid.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
As they’d been led to expect, a man is waiting for them as they emerge through customs and into Arrivals at Rome’s Fiumicino airport. Short, balding, middle-aged and, as far as Max and Harry could tell, Italian, he is jigging his name card absently, like a mother rocking a baby, as if the movement might sooner catch the attention of Kimber and Draycott – although he seems to instantly recognise them as they wheel their cabin-sized suitcases out onto the concourse. Had he been sent a photograph of them? Who took the photograph and when? Harry’s paranoia, Max is coming to realise, is contagious.
“Buongiorno, signori,” he says. “Passports please.”
Max and Harry exchange a glance, Max nods and they hand over their passports. Unsmiling, the man flips on to their photo ID, nods, and hands them back. “Follow me please.”
He strides surprisingly purposively for such an unassuming-looking man, leading them down an escalator, through some sliding doors and past taxi queues. A small car park houses the various hire companies – Avis, Hertz and so on – but in an unmarked area behind these is their transport, a black van that manages to look fairly innocuous despite the blacked-out windows.
“A Mercedes Viano,” says Max, who, despite his disdain at the investment returns on ever actually buying a car, seems to know his vehicles. He’s been ferried around London in one of these, usually with Simon.
The Italian nods. “Mercedes, si,” he echoes, as he blips open the vehicle, and reaches on to the front passenger seat, emerging with the hire documents and a plastic shopping bag, which he hands to Harry. It’s full of mobile phones.
“Use it once then throw away,” he says, brandishing one of the phones and mimicking the act of throwing. His eyes are on Harry, intense and serious. “Now… aspetta… please wait a moment.”
He presses a number and waits, and almost immediately a text message bleeps in return. The man takes the mobile, climbs into the passenger seat of the vehicle, and starts inputting some coordinates into the satnav. He waits a moment, checks that he has entered the correct destination, and slides out of the seat again. He looks comically tiny for such a large van.
“This,” he says. “This now finished.” Max notices that it’s an old model iPhone – an iPhone 4 – before the man extracts the Sim card, slips it into the breast pocket of his jacket, puts the phone on the ground, before repeatedly stamping on its with his heel, and turning to them with a dramatic flourish. “Remember; use once and then chuck,” he repeats. “They are all prepaid with cash. Now your own phones please…”
“You what?” says Harry.
“You want our phones?” echoes Max. He looks as if he’s been asked to hand over one of his kidneys.
“It is essential,” says the man. “They will be posted to your office in London.”
“But what about using the Internet?”
“Don’t use the Internet.” They stand staring at the man. “Please, your phones.”
“Oh well, in for a penny,” says Max, who fully intends buying a new one as soon as possible.
“The Internet on these has been permanently disabled,” says the man, pointing at the bag of phones in Harry’s hand. Everything is paid for,” he says, handing Max the key. “Arrivederci.”
With that, he turns and marches off, Max and Harry watching him stop at some lifts, and then vanish behind their sliding doors.
“O… kay,” says Harry. But Max has opened the back door of the Mercedes and is appraising the interior. The inside has been reconfigured so that it looks like a tiny sitting room, with four deep individual leather seats, the rear two divided by a table. The ones he’d ridden in London had had TV screens between the rear and the driver, but this one is interconnected.
“Well, which phone shall we start with?” asks Harry.
“You choose,” says Max settling himself down in the driver’s seat and trying out the position of the gear stick and rear-view mirror. He takes out a wad of euros, slips them into the plastic folder with the hire documents, and puts the folder underneath the sun visor.
“You never know”, he says.
As always when they share a car anywhere together, the assumption is that Max will drive. Not that Max is a particularly expert driver – he is safe enough and not easily distracted – the assumption merely seems to reflect the rest of their lives. Max takes control; Harry goes along for the ride.
The satnav soon leads them on an autostrada that leads them to a ring-road circling Rome, the A90. Eventually Max is prompted to take an exit, which seems to be taking them away from Rome.
Harry notices with pleasure the tall cypress trees that line an otherwise anonymous dual carriageway through an industrial suburb of warehouses and car dealerships. The temperature, according to a red neon sign outside a chemist shop, is 22 degrees. The time is 10.32, but it feels so much later.
At traffic lights no one seems to give the black Mercedes with blacked-out windows a second glance, which reassures Harry. They take a right down a narrower road, the scrubby spaces between buildings becoming larger, until they reach what feels like a town centre with smaller shops. Twenty metres and on their left they have reached their destination, the satnav announces.
“There it is,” Max almost shouts, looking across to Harry and out of the offside window.
“What is?” asks Harry, who has been trying to figure out why a wealthy Saudi woman and her playboy lover would choose to hole up in such an anonymous, working-class suburb as this.
“The cafe… the one in the photograph.”
The Cafe Paolo has a white facade that also advertises ice creams and pizza, above a pavement terrace – the terrace where Aafia and her boyfriend were photographed – that is demarcated by four or five plant pots with nothing growing in them. An old man is the only customer on the terrace, stirring a cup of espresso, before unfolding a newspaper and disappearing behind it. Another old man in serge trousers is shuffling his way past, shopping basket in hand. A van is unloading vegetables – boxes of lettuce and cucumbers – to a greengrocer next door. A boy on a noisy moped breaks the torpor of the scene, which then folds back on itself as he disappears round the corner, the sharp racket of his machine growing steadily less ear-splitting.
“What now?” asks Harry.
“Fancy a coffee?”
“Good idea.”
There are three
men seated at a table playing cards, and they look up briefly as Max and Harry – suddenly very aware of the expensive cuts of their chinos and tailored shirts – make their way to the bar.
“Si signori?” says an old woman, rinsing glasses and not looking at them.
“Duo cafes,” says Harry, who on the flight has been reading a tourist Italian phrasebook he bought at the airport.
They had barely retired to a table three along from the card players when Harry jumps out of his seat and dashes round next to where Max is sitting with his back to the window.
“I don’t believe it,” he hisses. “Don’t look… it’s them.”
Max turns and looks all the same. Aafia and her boyfriend have settled at a table on the terrace and are sitting there, looking absently out into the road – the man with a packet of cigarettes and a lighter stacked in front of him, just as they had been in the photographs that Aafia’s father had shown them.
The old woman notices them too. She emerges from behind the bar and shuffles over to the door. Max takes up position in Harry’s old chair and puts on his sunglasses, making him look twice as conspicuous as before. The card players obviously think Max’s choice of indoor eyewear is odd, because two of them are now staring at him. They must look like a couple of plainclothes policemen, thinks Harry. No, too well-dressed for policemen. Gangsters?
The old woman is having a long conversation with Aafia and her boyfriend. What are they talking about? The unbelievably hot spring weather? Global warming? The price of coffee? The two strangers inside? Not once do they glance in the direction of the interior, Max is relieved to note. But what to do now?
The old woman decides for them. She shuffles back into the cafe and over to their table.
“The signor and signora ask if you would like to join them on the terrace,” she announces in remarkably clear English. “Two more coffees?”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Aafia has that amused turn to her mouth that Harry had noticed on first seeing her in London. The man has an unreadable expression behind his dark glasses. He has several days growth of stubble and a strong, beak-like nose: Libyan, Aafia’s father had said.
“We meet again,” says Max, scraping back a white plastic chair to join them. “Can we have our diamond back? Or do you plan to pay for it now?”
The man laughs, a rumbling smoker’s laugh. He taps out a cigarette from his packet of Marlboro Reds, puts it between his lips and lights it. “Tariq is my name,” he says emitting a plume of smoke.
“Daddy told you where to find us then?” says Aafia, cutting sharply across Tariq. “What a kind man. So caring. He must really like you.”
“Daddy wants you to come home,” says Harry.
“Is he worried about me?” says Aafia in a mock childish voice, turning to him. “I doubt it. He’s just using you to get at me.”
“I don’t care about that,” puts in Max, suddenly business-like. “Fact. You have our diamond and you haven’t paid for it. We would like it back or we’d like paying for it.”
The man lets out a long deliberate plume of smoke, and shares a silent conversation with Aafia.
“Come on then – come with us,” she says. “Leave your car here, we only live a couple of blocks away.”
The next part has the logic of a dream, or a nightmare. They follow two paces behind Aafia and her boyfriend, who’s wearing white jeans, a short-sleeved white cotton or polyester shirt, and dusty old battered loafers. Aafia is wearing an expensive cut of blue jeans that show off her beautiful round bottom and long legs. Harry can’t help but notice. Neither would appear to be carrying a gun or a weapon of any sort.
No one speaks, they just trudge along, Harry and Max both feeling that they are doing something dangerous and stupid, but, despite the feeling in their stomachs that they are looking over a great precipice, both men feel compelled to continue as if in a trance. Harry had read a book once in which prisoners were taken out to be shot by a firing squad and he had often wondered what it must be like to be drawn to your certain extinction. Now he thinks he has a rough idea.
The sense of being led meekly into a trap intensifies when they reach a door in a long white wall. The boyfriend opens it, peeks in to check something, and then opens it wide, beckoning them to enter.
Inside is a large yard to what looks like a compound of several huts and sheds. The boyfriend takes out his key ring and presses a fob button, which in turn activates a door on one of the breeze-block garages at the end of the yard. Max and Harry walk helplessly towards this as if resigned to their doom, on legs that seem to have lost all feeling.
Inside the garage is a car – a shiny new navy blue Audi A6 – while various cans line the walls. The shelves are stacked with the usual sort of things you might find in a garage: spanner sets, foot-pumps, a big can of WD 40… but the boyfriend is now unlocking an inner door at the far end that Max notices with dread contains steps down into some sort of basement or cellar.
Down they go, towards a dim light at the end that Max sees is a table. Two men, burly and mute, are standing against the walls, but seated around the table are three – what Max’s father used to refer to (usually in the context of a derogatory remark) as ‘Middle Eastern gentlemen’. Two are about Max and Harry’s age, but between them is an athletic dark-skinned man who is younger. He has a black scarf draped around his shoulders and a scar running down one of his cheeks. Max looks into the man’s eyes and it’s like running into a brick wall.
“Take your jackets off.”
It’s the man to the left of this unsettling youth who has spoken – and his accent is northern. Max thinks it might be a Yorkshire accent, although he is very sketchy about England north of the Cotswolds. He spent three years at Edinburgh University, but even there had mixed mostly with public schoolboys like himself.
“Your jackets,” the man repeats.
Harry realises that his shirt is soaked in sweat. Max’s, he notices, is still dry, as Max peels off his jacket, and neatly folds it over the back of one of the chairs. A man steps forward from against the wall, pulls the jacket roughly from the back of the chair, and starts checking the pockets. Having extracted Max’s wallet and passport, which he throws on to the table, he chucks the jacket on to the floor, and gives it a kick for good measure. Harry hands his jacket to the man, who gives it a similar treatment.
“Watches… and that,” orders the Englishman, pointing at the fitness-tracker on Max’s wrist. Harry wonders what sleep patterns it would register in the coming days. Max’s pulse rate is presumably off the scale, although he notices an oddly detached look on his friend’s face. Perhaps he’s in shock.
And then a powerful force is wrenching his hands behind his back, and they are being bound. Harry lets out a yelp as rope or cord seems to cut through his wrists. He tries to wiggle his fingers but that just makes the stinging worse.
“Not so tight,” shouts Max, as if this was a game of make-believe, as both he and Max are pressed down into the vacant chairs.
The northern-accented man opens and shakes Max’s wallet, depositing bank cards and driving licence and a wad of euros, pristine from the cash point at the airport, on the table. He picks up Max’s fitness tracker and looks at it in bemusement.
“This have GPS in it?” he asks the man with the scar, who nods, takes the fitness tracker from him and grinds it under his booted heel.
“What are your names?” asks the northerner.
“Max and Harry,” says Max, as just then a door opens and another man brings in their overnight bags and the plastic bag containing the mobile phones. So they’ve broken into the van. Max still has the keys in his trouser pockets.
The two older men at the table lean in and exchange something in Arabic. The younger man nods, and looks at Harry. “What are you doing here?” he asks in good if heavily accented English. Harry can only stare dumbly back. What is he doing here in a cellar somewhere outside Rome?
“Your friend Aafia stole our diamond,” says Ma
x, in a cool, clear voice, and looking around for Aafia, but she has vanished, along with her boyfriend. “And we are trying to get it back. Aafia’s father, told us where to find her. It’s that simple.”
“There is no diamond,” the man says. “I don’t believe you… you are spies. British spies.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Max and Harry find themselves being lifted from behind and pushed towards a door, which leads into another inner sanctum, this one with its walls lined in mattresses. In the middle of a room a video camera sits on a stand and the two of them are prodded towards the front of the lens. A painful kick to the back of their knees finds them sprawled on the floor.
“On your knees,” says the young man with the scar. “Pray that your god will save you.” With that, he leaves the room and Max and Harry are left on their own.
“Fucking shit,” says Harry.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck…” says Max.
A minute passes, or maybe five – it’s impossible to tell. Max sits himself on his bottom and Harry follows suit.
“They’re going to kill us for a gawping internet audience of millions. Something to watch between the kitten videos,” says Max. “Poor Rachel… and Mum and Dad…”
At that moment one of the security heavies comes into the room, and walks over to where the camera still stands, and to Max and Harry’s astonishment he picks up the camera and throws it on to the concrete floor. He then does likewise with the laptop that sits on a small wicker table in the corner.
They say nothing but watch him walk round behind them. Harry gives an involuntary shudder, and feels something tugging at his wrists. Suddenly the sharp, burning pain has gone and he can move his hands.
“Move your fingers… get the circulation going,” the man says to Harry, before cutting Max free as well. They can finally see the cords that have been causing them so much agony; it looks like strimmer wire.
The Concierge Page 11
