The Martyr’s Curse (Ben Hope, Book 11)

by Scott Mariani

  ‘Thought you must be dead,’ Rollo said on the phone. There was no smile in his voice.

  ‘No such luck,’ Ben said.

  ‘So you’re back in the game?’

  ‘This time it’s a personal thing,’ Ben told him. ‘I need to meet.’

  ‘I’m a very busy man. What do you want?’

  ‘The usual. To be pointed in the right direction.’

  ‘I can already tell you, I don’t know shit about shit.’

  ‘You know everyone, Rollo. There isn’t a rotten little scam going in this town that you don’t hear about.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I’m not in the information trade any more,’ Rollo said. ‘I’ve got bigger fish to fry these days. And besides, I don’t like the way you do business.’

  ‘Five minutes,’ Ben said. ‘That’s all I ask. For old times’ sake.’

  ‘How sweet. What’s in it for me?’

  ‘Same as last time,’ Ben said. ‘I let you hobble away no more of a fucked-up cripple than you are already.’

  ‘See, that’s what I’m saying. I’m not feeling the love.’

  ‘Plus, I’ll let you have Eriq back,’ Ben said.

  There was a long pause on the line. ‘What makes you think I want the fucker?’

  ‘You don’t have to be coy,’ Ben said. ‘I know how things are with you and Eriq. Though it’s hard to tell who’s got the worse taste in partners.’

  ‘Five minutes.’

  ‘Not a moment longer.’

  ‘No funny business?’

  ‘Not unless you start it,’ Ben said.

  ‘I’m at Club Paradis. Rue du Vallon Montebello. Know it?’

  The time was 11.16. ‘Give me thirty minutes,’ Ben said.

  He was there by 11.35. He left the Hummer a hundred metres away, as tucked out of sight among the parked cars as a vehicle of its size could be, shouldered his bag and marched the now-conscious and very unhappy Eriq Sabatier all the way up the street already crowded with nightlife, past the hookers and the brightly lit shopfronts and the two hairy idiots cruising the kerb on chopperised Harley Davidsons with ape-hanger bars and open exhausts that sounded like a bad case of flatulence. None of the ravers in the street seemed to care that the heavens were about to open. The first rumblings were already sounding from up above. Any minute now, big raindrops would start spattering the pavements.

  Club Paradis was exactly what Ben expected it to be from the flashing pink neon sign over the door shaped like a naked woman. He supposed it made sense for a gay gangster to run a strip joint. It showed a certain kind of professionalism, like a teetotaller running a pub. The music inside was raucous, the crowd was heaving and swelling, the girls were doing their thing at their poles and attracting howls of enthusiasm from a couple of hundred sweaty punters, while another hundred thronged the bar. Nobody paid any notice as Ben shoved Eriq Sabatier through the middle of the throng, towards the door at the side of the bar marked PRIVÉ. Ben’s progress was unobstructed, until he came to the door and a very large, square-shouldered, shaven-headed guy with a pointed goatee beard and a Slayer T-shirt two sizes too small for him stepped up to block his way. He towered over Ben by about a foot and a half. The bouncer, Ben guessed. Or Rollo’s personal minder. The huge man glared at him and pointed at the sign with a heavily muscled arm.

  Ben gave him a wintry smile, nodded his head back at Eriq and said over the noise, ‘Delivering a package to Rollo. He’s expecting me.’

  The big man pursed his lips, made a fair show of looking as if he was thinking, then lumbered aside and let Ben through. Behind the door was a dingy passage with three more doors off it. One to each side and one straight ahead. One of Ben’s mottoes from SAS days was if in doubt, bear dead ahead. Still keeping a tight grip on Eriq, he strode up the passage and shoved open the door in front of him without knocking.

  ‘You truly are moving up in the world, Rollo,’ he said.

  The office was square and dark, lit by a single desk lamp. The walls seemed to throb with the muted beat of the loud music from the club. Cigar smoke swirled in the light and clung to the ceiling like a thick layer of fog. Rollo le Tordu apparently existed on carbon monoxide. He was the only person in the room, lounging in a huge reclining leather chair at the desk, facing the door. Behind him stood a big black steel safe, hanging ajar far enough that Ben could glimpse stacked bricks of banknotes inside. Business must be good.

  ‘You haven’t changed much, Hope,’ said Rollo with the kind of smile a crocodile gives a baby wildebeest before dragging it into the river. His skin was like parchment. He wore small round glasses and nearly all his hair was gone. He was dressed in a silk Armani suit, but he didn’t wear it well. Even sitting, his spine looked more twisted than ever.

  Ben shut the door. ‘Wish I could say the same about you, Rollo. Did your friends come back and throw you off another bridge?’

  ‘Charming as ever,’ Rollo said. He took a draw on his cigar and reclined further in the chair.

  ‘Here’s your errand boy back.’ There was another leather-covered chair in the corner. Ben flung Eriq into it.

  ‘He just walked in and—’ Eriq began explaining.

  Rollo turned the crocodile look on him. ‘You’re a fucking imbecile, you know that?’

  ‘What was I supposed to do? Said he was gonna burn the building down.’

  ‘Still standing,’ Ben said. ‘That’s my side of the deal honoured.’

  ‘Except for the part where you don’t try any funny stuff,’ Rollo said warily.

  ‘That part’s up to you,’ Ben said.

  ‘So what do you want?’

  Ben stepped up to the desk. It was broad, dark wood like the rest of the office, topped with green leather. He dumped his bag down in the middle of it. The thump of something solid and heavy inside wasn’t lost on Rollo.

  ‘I don’t deal in guns,’ Rollo said.

  ‘Different kind of hardware, Rollo.’ Ben unstrapped the bag, reached inside and took out the gold bar. He held it up for Rollo to see, letting the light glitter along its surface, then allowed it to fall to the desktop. It hit the wood with a crash. Rollo didn’t seem concerned about his dented desk. He was too spellbound by the gold bar. ‘Is that what I think it is?’

  ‘A lot more where that came from,’ Ben said. ‘At least, there was. And that’s why I’m here. I need to know if anyone’s brought a shipment into town in the last twelve hours or so. Handlers, fences, middlemen. You know them all. I want names and addresses.’

  ‘How big a shipment we talking about?’ Rollo said, staring at the gold, eyes bulging, not blinking, behind the little round glasses.

  ‘Considerable. I’m thinking Russians.’

  Rollo nodded pensively, anxiety flashing in his expression. ‘The Russians are into some big deals, all right. But what makes you think it’s them?’

  ‘Somebody left a calling card behind when they took the gold. Someone with a liking for black Sobranies.’

  Rollo finally tore his gaze from the gold bar and looked long and hard at Ben, his glasses glimmering in the light. He stubbed the cigar out on the onyx ashtray at his elbow. ‘Have you any idea what you’re getting into, if the Russians have anything to do with this? How’d you get involved, you crazy English bastard?’

  ‘Half Irish,’ Ben said. ‘They involved me when they shot a bunch of my friends. They opened that door. Not me. Now they’ll have to deal with what they find on the other side of it.’

  ‘You go anywhere near those people, they’ll gut and fillet you like a fish. They’ll nail you upside down to a wall and slice your balls off.’

  ‘We’ll have to see about that,’ Ben said.

  ‘These friends of yours, do they have names?’

  ‘They weren’t exactly the kind of people you’d have in your address book, Rollo. Not in your class.’

  Rollo pursed his lips again and returned his attention to the gold bar. He picked it up in his long, thin hands, hefted it and turned it over under the light with a
look of adoration.

  ‘Don’t get too attached,’ Ben said.

  ‘I don’t know how you think I can help you,’ Rollo said.

  ‘You’re in the business.’

  Rollo put the bar down and looked up sharply. The crocodile expression was back. ‘That’s right, I am. I’m in the getting my fair share of what’s going around business. If I help you, there’s a price to pay. Especially if the Russians are involved.’

  ‘I told you what’s in it for you if you help me. You can still get around with the help of a stick, and you can still chew solid food.’

  ‘You’re not such a nice guy, are you?’

  ‘You don’t want to know.’

  Rollo sighed. ‘All right. I can ask around. Give me forty-eight hours.’ He paused, caressed the gold bar as if it was a purring cat. ‘Leave this with me. I might need to show it to a couple of people.’

  Ben shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t leave you alone with that for forty-eight seconds, Rollo. You can unglue your eyes from it, because this is the last you’ll see of it.’

  ‘We trade,’ Rollo said. ‘The information, for the bar.’

  ‘Don’t push me,’ Ben said. ‘That wasn’t the deal.’

  Rollo laid four thin fingers across the top of the gold bar. ‘You put something like this on the table, that’s where it stays. You think you dictate terms around here, smart guy? Who the fuck do you think you are?’

  Ben gazed steadily at him. He concentrated hard on putting as much meaning into his gaze as possible. You’re a hair’s breadth from finding out exactly who I am. I’m the guy who’s going to break you in pieces. It was a look of final warning. He was down to his last drop of patience. ‘The information. Now.’

  ‘Here’s some information for you,’ Rollo said. ‘You’re going to die, Hope.’

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Rollo banged on the desk. Yelled, ‘Jean-Claude! Bruno!’

  The office door burst in and crashed juddering against the wall. Behind it, one big hand splayed out like a battering ram, came the huge square-shouldered guy in the Slayer T-shirt. The bouncer. Behind him came another man who might have been his younger brother, an inch shorter and a foot wider, with a crab-apple face and an arrowhead haircut. Both had to duck for the doorway and turn a little sideways to squeeze their bulk through it. Once inside the room, the tops of their heads were lost in the cigar haze that covered the ceiling, like mountain peaks shrouded in cloud. Between them they carried about four times Ben’s weight in lard and muscle. They must have been standing right outside the door, waiting for the order from their boss. It seemed a little too prearranged for Ben’s liking.

  ‘Kill this fucker for me,’ Rollo told them, with a wave of his hand.

  Ben didn’t much like the look of what they’d brought with them either. Slayer reached into his back pocket and yanked out a length of slim steel chain that he held in both fists and stretched out taut, like a garrotte. Little Brother was clutching a double-barrelled shotgun that had been sawn off at both ends to make a pistol out of it, eighteen inches long. The kind of idiot weapon that could kill everyone in the room with its indiscriminate spray.

  Ben would have liked to get the gun off him as a matter of priority, but Slayer was standing in the way, snapping the chain tight in his fists and looking as if he could twist a man’s head off with it. Which, Ben understood, was probably the case. All the more reason for not letting the chain get around his neck. He could worry about the shotgun afterwards. If there was an afterwards.

  Ben flexed his legs into a fighting crouch, shifting his weight from foot to foot. He circled his fists like a boxer and threw an upward punch at Slayer’s face. Slayer saw it coming and ducked his head back, and the punch fell short. But it was meant to. Its purpose was just to draw the guy’s attention to what Ben’s upper body was doing. Slayer’s little pig eyes were fixed on Ben’s moving fists, which was where Ben wanted them. He’d see a punch coming, but not what was following it. A certain kind of bar-room brawler always seemed to forget that the strongest limbs of the human body weren’t the arms, no matter how muscle-bound they might be. Ben bounced once, twice, then launched a kick into Slayer’s groin. He rotated all his energy and weight into it. The toe of his boot connected like a baseball bat with soft flesh, and Ben knew it was a good one. Slayer’s big fleshy jaw dropped open and the piggy eyes widened in pain and shock. The chain jangled out of his fists and he fell to his knees. So far the fight had lasted about two seconds.

  A certain kind of bar-room brawler also liked to shave his head, to prevent an opponent from grabbing a handful of it to their advantage in a fight. Which made good tactical sense to Ben. But what he’d never been able to understand was why those same guys often sported goatee beards. Maybe they thought it made them look wicked and intimidating. To Ben, they just looked like a convenient handle, an alternative way of grabbing someone’s head that defeated the whole object of the shaven head thing. As Slayer fell to his knees, and before the howl of pain had burst from his lips, Ben took hold of the goatee with his left hand. It was rigid with hairspray, like a strange black horn attached to the guy’s chin, forming part of his jawbone. Ben gripped it tightly and jerked it hard towards the floor, plunging Slayer’s head violently downwards straight into Ben’s rising right kneecap. Another hard impact, this time not against soft flesh. Bone on bone, and Ben’s knee was considerably more solid than Slayer’s face. He felt the crunch as the guy’s nose burst all over the place. Ben let him flop to the floor and stamped on the back of his head. A little disincentive to stop him from getting up again too soon.

  Four seconds into the fight, one down, one to go.

  Little Brother’s red face was contorted with rage. He raised the shotgun, teeth bared. Then realised that his boss was directly behind Ben and right in the field of fire. He hesitated, began to shuffle sideways to get a clear shot at Ben, but he was slow. Much slower than Rollo, who was jumping out of his chair with surprising speed and hustling around the side of the desk towards the open door. Ben would have blocked his exit, but he had to do something about the shotgun before Little Brother realised he had a clear shot. Ben’s hand whipped back behind his right hip and tore out of his belt the nickel-plated Beretta nine-millimetre he’d taken from Eriq. He brought it up faster than Little Brother could get the shotgun aimed. Flicked off the safety as he swung it, and was about to yell at Little Brother to drop the shotgun when Eriq Sabatier saw his chance and launched his wiry frame out of the chair in the corner to try and make a grab for the pistol in Ben’s hand.

  Ben clubbed Eriq in the face with it and sent him sprawling into Little Brother. Eriq was no heavyweight, but the force of the impact knocked the shotgun off course just as Little Brother was squeezing the trigger. It went off like a bomb detonating inside the office. Blasted a broad furrow out of the top of the desk and blew apart the leather chair Eriq had been sitting in. Ben felt the heat of the muzzle flash and the pain of the deafening noise lance his eardrums. With no shoulder stock to cushion the gun against the shooter’s body mass, and most of the counterbalancing weight of the steel of the barrels cut away from the front, the sawn-off twelve-bore was virtually uncontrollable in recoil. All brute force and no finesse, like the ape holding it. Even the strongest hands couldn’t stop it from bucking violently upwards with the power of the blast.

  Before Little Brother could get back on target for a second shot, Ben was on him, gained control of the weapon and swept his squat, thick legs out from under him with a scything kick.

  Gravity did the rest. Little Brother went down faster and harder than his elder sibling had. Ben kicked him again before he could scramble upright, a single brutal blow just behind the ear. Not hard enough to tear his head off and launch it into the far wall, but he wouldn’t be back on his feet for a while either. He heaved once and went slack and inert on the floor.

  Eriq was backing away, showing Ben his palms and shaking his head in supplication, as if to say ‘Please, don’t hur
t me’.

  Ben wasn’t interested in Eriq. Rollo was gone. Ben trampled over the slumped mound of Little Brother to get to the door, hurried out into the passage beyond and saw one of the side doors hanging open. Through it, he could see brick wall. An alleyway running along the back of the strip club. He ran to the exit. No sign of Rollo. He could move fast for a crippled guy, and there were a dozen ways he could have gone. There was no point in going after him. An uncomfortable feeling was growing on Ben that Rollo couldn’t help him anyway.

  ‘Damn,’ Ben muttered.

  Back inside the office, Eriq Sabatier went down on his knees, pleading for his life. Ben stepped over the unconscious bodies of Bruno and Jean-Claude, whichever was which. He raised the Beretta and pointed it at Eriq’s head. If the blast of a twelve-bore wasn’t raising any alarms thanks to the blare of the music next door, then the comparatively quieter snap of a nine-millimetre wasn’t going to draw attention either.

  ‘Please,’ Eriq said.

  Ben hesitated with his finger on the trigger. Saw the bodies of his dead friends. Saw the look on Roby’s face as he died.

  Then he looked at the pitiful crook kneeling in front of him. The guy was guilty of a thousand crimes. But not that one.

  Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.

  And in any case, Ben wasn’t going to bring down the Marseille crime scene with a single bullet. This wasn’t his war.

  So instead he just clubbed Eriq over the head with the pistol, and knocked him out. He slipped the gun back in his belt. Picked the gold bar off the desk and turned to the two unconscious heavies and used the bar edge-on to break all sixteen of their fingers. Just in case of repercussions, and it did the job better than a pistol butt or the heel of his boot. Rollo wasn’t the most forgiving kind of person. Now, whenever he came skulking back thinking the coast was clear, he’d find he had some extra personnel issues to consider. These two would be in plaster for a while.