by Mark Burnell
'I'm not sure. A few days.'
'Have the police been in contact?'
Instinctively, Newman and Stephanie glanced at each other. Stephanie made a circular motion with her finger to encourage him to continue.
Newman nodded and said, 'No. Why? Have they been in contact with you?'
'Yes. Well through Balthazar, actually …'
Newman mouthed the word 'lawyer' to Stephanie. 'What did they want?'
'Just a few questions. To see whether I could assist them with anything. I'm afraid I wasn't much help.'
Stephanie prompted him again.
'Did you say you'd seen me?'
Zahani paused. 'No.'
'They haven't left a message for me yet. I better call them when I get back.'
'You better call me too.'
'I will. We'll have dinner.'
'I look forward to it. I can't tell you how much this has unsettled me.'
'It's a great shock,' Newman confirmed.
'Thank you for calling, Robert. You better get some sleep.'
'Before I do, the real reason I phoned: I have a favour to ask.'
Résidence Sienne was a dreary tower-block on place de Vénétie, east of avenue d'Italie. The square itself was small and mostly concrete. Patches of grass and asthmatic trees were cast into shade by the surrounding high-rises. The entrance was cramped between a laundromat and a Vietnamese restaurant. Stephanie spoke into an entry-phone that crackled with static.
'I'm here to see Étienne Lorenz.'
'The elevator doors don't open on the fourteenth. Go to the fifteenth and walk down.'
The skinny man who opened the door was wearing a lime-green poncho, black leather trousers with large silver studs down each leg and a pair of Aviator Ray-Bans. He smelt of dope and dirt.
'Étienne Lorenz?'
'He's asleep.'
'Who are you?'
'Pico. You?'
'He agreed to see me.'
'Today?'
Stephanie nodded. 'Now.'
Pico led her to a living-room at the rear. Stephanie looked out of the window at place de Vénétie. She watched people scuttle in and out of the large supermarket, its garish scarlet and blue neon providing the only brightness on a dismal morning.
She heard movement behind her and turned round. He wore a dark grey towelling dressing gown over pale grey skin. He yawned, scratched his genitals through the dressing-gown, then looked at her properly.
And was astonished.
His eyes widened, over-exposing two bloodshot whites. But he didn't say a word. Instead, the surprise mutated into curiosity before subsiding into something inscrutable. Stephanie watched the transformation without comment. She'd always favoured tactical silences.
Étienne Lorenz patted both pockets fruitlessly before finding a pack of Merit cigarettes on the smoked-glass table. He lit one, coughed furiously, wiped the tears from his eyes, then took two drags as deep into his lungs as he could.
Stephanie wondered how Lorenz had ever drifted into Leonid Golitsyn's refined orbit.
'Have we met?'
She shrugged. 'You tell me.'
'I'm asking, cutie.'
'I don't think so.'
He glanced at Pico, who'd entered the room and was leaning against the wall by the door. 'She doesn't think so.'
Pico smiled. He had two gold teeth. The rest were brown.
Étienne Lorenz's initial shock now dissolved into sly pleasure. 'Well, well, cutie – how come you knew the old man?'
'It's a long story.'
'Ever meet any of his friends?'
A strange question, Stephanie felt, but she played it straight. 'No.'
'You sure about that?'
'I think I'd remember.'
'How about modelling?'
'What?'
'Ever done any modelling?'
'Very funny.'
'I'm serious. You look fit.'
'I am fit.'
'You should think about it. With a little work on your face …'
Pico sniggered in the corner.
Stephanie said, 'I'm sure we're all busy so why don't we get on with it?'
Lorenz shrugged, mimicking disappointment. 'Okay. Just asking. Want some coffee?'
'Only if you're making some.'
The kitchen opened on to a small balcony that was fully occupied by a ferocious fila brasileira with a stainless-steel choke-collar. The moment the dog saw Stephanie it started barking, pressing its face against the glass door, which shuddered under the assault.
'Easy, Giselle,' Lorenz murmured, before turning to Stephanie with a grin. 'Just as well you're a friend, no?'
Stephanie smiled lamely. 'So, what line of work are you in?'
'You don't know?'
'That's why I'm asking.'
'I'm a photographer. I thought you were at the studio yesterday.'
'Could've been an artist's studio.'
'In a way, it is. I'm a photographic artist. Mostly.'
'Mostly?'
'I have other business interests. Commercial property, cheap rentals. I got a couple of cafés along avenue d'Italie and a share in two nightclubs. One over in Montreuil, one in Saint-Denis.'
'A busy man.'
'That's why I have people working for me, cutie.'
'People like Pico over there?'
'Pico knows things about Paris that nobody else knows.'
'I can imagine.'
'In answer to your question, I'm an entrepreneur. An impresario.'
'Run out of this very impressive office?'
Lorenz spun round, the good humour gone. 'This is my home, cutie.'
'Sorry. I hadn't realized you were the sensitive type.'
He waved the insult aside, his mood swinging back, just as wildly. 'My office is on the other side of the périphérique, in Kremlin-Bicêtre.'
Pico loitered in the doorway, rolling a cigarette with crooked fingers. Although she was now sitting still, Giselle continued to growl on the other side of the glass, pools of glossy saliva forming on the concrete directly beneath her mouth.
When the water had boiled Lorenz poured it into the cafetière. 'You don't look like the sort of bitch who'd be a friend of the old man's.'
'Nor do you.'
'That's because I only met him once and it was business. This business …'
'Since you've raised the subject … shall we?'
Lorenz reached into his dressing-gown pocket and produced a DVD in a see-through plastic wallet. He smirked at her. 'Here. Enjoy it.'
She took it and followed him back into the living-room. There were no markings of any kind. 'This is it?'
'What were you expecting? Ninety minutes of 70mm in a can?'
Stephanie put the disk in her pocket.
Lorenz began to depress the cafetière's plunger. 'You have something for me?'
She handed him a five-euro note, two euro coins and a fifty-cent piece. 'Seven fifty, right?'
'Hilarious,' he sneered. 'Now where is it?'
'That was the price we agreed.'
'Seven thousand five hundred, cutie.'
'Are you out of your mind? It's a DVD.'
He stuck out his hand. 'Okay. Give it back.'
'Take the money, Étienne. And be grateful.'
She feinted to her left. Pico's wild lunge from behind missed her and his momentum threw him off balance. Stephanie caught him with a reverse sweep of her right arm, the elbow clattering into his teeth. There was a loud crack. And then he went down.
Lorenz jumped back. 'Merde!'
Pico cupped his face. Blood dribbled between his fingers.
'Not on the floor, Pico! The carpet's new. Get off the floor!'
Lorenz charged at her. Stephanie leapt out of his way, grabbed the cafetière and swung it at him. It shattered, throwing hot coffee over him.
Trapped on the kitchen balcony, Giselle started howling. Stephanie could hear her thumping the glass door. Lorenz was trying to wave coffee off his scalded hands. Pico wa
s crawling off the carpet on to linoleum tiles, leaving blood and tooth chips in his wake.
Stephanie stepped over him and said to Lorenz, 'Keep the change.'
Down to the last set, the muscles in his arms and shoulders aflame. Which was good. Which was beautiful. The pain was the point. His face was puce, sinews and blood testing the skin, sweat dribbling into his eyes.
Manu, a doorman at Le Cab on place du Palais-Royal, stood over him. When Lance Grotius completed his final set of presses, Manu guided the bar and weights back into the cups of the stand.
Grotius sat up on the bench, panting heavily, enjoying the sensation of the tangerine vest sticking to his skin. Manu flicked him on the thigh with a hand-towel.
'Not bad for an old man.'
'Get lost.'
Manu grinned and leaned forward, lowering his voice. 'Got anything new?'
Grotius looked up at him. 'Like what?'
Manu shadow-boxed a little. 'Anything that gets the blood cooking.'
In the past, uncontrolled aggression had been regarded as an unwelcome steroid side-effect. But tastes changed. Especially in body-building. A new generation of steroids had been engineered specifically to enhance aggression.
Grotius shrugged. 'Depends.'
'On what?'
'You don't like needles, do you? They're syringe administration only.'
Manu grimaced. 'I'll think about it.'
'Do you really need to? You're in great shape.'
'All the other pricks are into it. You know how it is. Too much is never enough.'
An incontestable truth in the murky underworld of body-building. The gymnasium sound system echoed off hard surfaces. Between tracks came the rumble of traffic on avenue du Président Wilson two storeys beneath the wall of blacked-out windows. Grotius drank from a plastic bottle of mango juice. He'd read somewhere that mangoes delivered energy to the body swifter than any other fruit.
He'd been coming to Adonis for a year. He'd tried other places, closer to home, but they were filled with amateurs who never broke sweat. Adonis was hardcore weight-lifting. Neither he nor Manu wanted to be surrounded by old men on treadmills, or ladies in leotards doing Pilates. They wanted weights, muscles, grunts and the pungent aroma of stale sweat. All of which were abundant at Adonis.
In the locker room, his phone was ringing; Sweet Child 0' Mine by Guns N' Roses. He reached into his sports bag. It was a text message sent as junk mail.
SPECIAL DEAL! ALL SUBSCRIBERS!
Lucrative offer, immediate availability.
Secure downloads.
Confirm application by return.
He sent a blank reply.
Secure downloads. Two words that propelled a frisson of excitement through Grotius, the trigger for that feeling being the word 'secure'. In other words, the information was not to be downloaded at all. Instead, it would have to be collected in person. Which meant it was too sensitive to be disseminated over the security-sieve of the internet.
By the time he was out of the shower, there was another text.
Collection ready.
Usual outlet.
Offer ends 12:00.
Grotius looked at his watch. Five-past-ten. No problem. He took the Métro to Les Sablons and walked back along avenue Charles de Gaulle towards the Arc de Triomphe. He entered a nondescript apartment block with a car dealership at street level. In the stark entrance hall, pigeon holes were suspended from the wall on the right. Grotius opened 3C. There was a sealed, padded envelope inside.
Three floors above, apartment C was empty. He knew that; he'd checked once, out of curiosity. Forty-five minutes later, as he'd strolled down a sun-drenched rue du Faubourg Saint Honoré his phone had rung. When he'd answered it a man had muttered softly into his ear.
'This is the only warning you'll receive. Your collection point is in the entrance hall. Don't stray to the upper floors. Do it again and you'll be dead within sixty minutes.'
Before he'd had the chance to apologize the connection had been severed. Grotius wasn't scared of anything in life but he'd never been tempted to repeat the transgression.
It took less than ten minutes to return to his sixth-floor apartment on avenue des Ternes between boulevard Pereire and place du Général Koenig. He dropped his sports bag in the hall, collected a bottle of beetroot and carrot juice from the fridge and went into the living-room, where he tore open the envelope.
As ever, there were two things inside; a single sheet of paper and a smaller, second envelope, which would contain details of the target. Grotius put it to one side and turned his attention to the sheet of paper and the most crucial item on it.
It was in the regular place, close to the bottom. He'd had a five before. With noughts after it. But never six of them.
Five million US dollars.
He looked at the conditions, near the top, just below the instruction to burn the paper as soon as possible.
Status: open.
He wasn't alone. The contract was out to tender. It was a free-for-all. What did that mean? How many were there? Who deserved this?
He read the rest of the sheet – contact procedures, request procedures, a terse set of instructions – then set light to it with a match. Inside the information envelope were five stapled pages, a collection of photographs and a CD.
The first photograph was a terrible shot, blurred black-and-white, taken across a busy street, traffic in the way. A woman. That was as much as Grotius could tell. The second wasn't much better. She was sitting in a car. It was a long-lens shot through diagonal rain at dusk.
He looked at the top sheet of five and saw the name.
Reuter, Petra.
Lance Grotius whistled. In admiration, at first. Then in anticipation.
I go into Robert's office and slip the DVD I got from Étienne Lorenz into the computer. A luxurious sitting-room fills the screen; two sofas, armchairs, heavy curtains framing French windows. Some rich person's apartment, or a room in a grand hotel, perhaps. There are three people, a man and two women, one black, one white. They're drinking champagne from tall flutes. The bottle is in an ice-bucket, a starched linen napkin draped over the top.
The man is middle-aged, tall and slender, with a pleasant face. He wears khaki slacks, slip-ons and a pale blue button-down shirt, rolled up at the sleeves. The white woman has short, dark hair. She wears black jeans and a turquoise top. The black woman, who's several inches shorter, is extremely attractive and wears a slinky black dress. She's already kicked off her shoes.
It doesn't take a genius to predict what's going to happen.
The first thing I notice is that nobody appears to be aware of the camera. The body-language is wrong. Which means at least one person's about to get set up. Almost certainly the man. I look at him with a measure of pity, which is when I notice the second thing.
It's Anders Brand.
It has to be a mistake. I look again as the party of three move through to the bedroom. A new set of cameras are in place to greet them.
There's no mistake. It's him.
They carry their glasses, Brand carries the bottle. He puts it on a bedside table. The white girl is unbuttoning her jeans. When he turns round Brand wears a sheepish grin. Pretty soon, that's all he's wearing; with varying degrees of imagination, the three of them fumble their way towards nakedness.
It's like watching a car-crash unfold in slow-motion. Three vehicles skidding out of control, the outcome inevitable, the tangled contact a mere formality.
Most clandestine films are poorly shot. Not this one. Now that we're in the bedroom there are several cameras operating, some capable of motion, all capable of zoom. The sound is as clear as the image. I can see and hear everything. Including the syrupy moans of the black girl as she sinks to her knees at the foot of the bed to give him a blow-job. He's kissing the other girl, running a hand over her breasts.
Everyone moves on to the bed. For a while Brand is content to let the girls have sex while he drinks a glass of champagne. Then
he joins them.
Anders Brand, The Whisperer. The former Swedish diplomat. The former UN negotiator. A man universally trusted and respected. Lying on his back with his head lost between a pair of muscular black thighs, his penis lost between a pair of muscular white thighs. Not quite the image of Brand that Kofi Annan holds in his memory, I suspect.
Golitsyn agreed to buy this disk from Étienne Lorenz. The night before Brand died in Passage du Caire, he and Golitsyn had dinner at the Hotel Meurice. Did they talk about this?
Now Brand is taking the black girl from behind with impressive vigour. His eyes are transfixed by the sight of himself sliding in and out of her. Drops of sweat fall from his brow on to the small of her back. She, in turn, has her mouth buried between the white girl's legs. Their moans and gasps sound comical, like a wretched performance from a tone-deaf choir of three.
Time for a change; the white girl slides into position and waits for Brand to enter her. Which is when I notice something on her left shoulder. A blemish of some sort. At first I think it's a tattoo. But when he pulls her towards him I see that it's a scar. Ragged and round, a couple of centimetres across. By the time he's fully inside her, I can see the back of her left shoulder, where there's another scar, same shape, same size.
It's startling how similar we are.
It's startling that I never noticed before.
Perhaps it was because I knew it wasn't me. Perhaps it's because her hair is shorter. Perhaps it's because I was so surprised to see Anders Brand on screen.
It doesn't matter. Now that I know who she is, the likeness is astonishing. I watch her – or do I mean me? – for a couple of minutes, trying to establish some differences. At first, there don't seem to be any. Later, gradually, one or two suggest themselves. Her figure is a little fuller, perhaps. Maybe her breasts are a little larger. Maybe she's sexier, I don't know.
And I don't really care. I'm well beyond that.
Étienne Lorenz's reaction to me begins to make sense. The look of amazement the moment he saw me. The snide questions that he and Pico found so amusing.
Ever done any modelling?
First Stalingrad, now this.
Am I looking at the woman who's supposed to live in that apartment? An apartment paid for by Leonid Golitsyn, the man who agreed to buy this disk.
