“I think I will take the plateau of fruits de mer,” She told the waiter. “Then bring me the fish, grilled with rosemary and with a green salad.”
“And to drink?”
“Sancerre rosé, and some Perrier.”
She closed the menu with a snap and handed it back, with the air of a woman who knows what she is about.
“And for monsieur?”
“Coffee and some more Armagnac.”
The waiter bent his head and went away with his head held at an angle which said quite clearly that there is something very odd about a man who eats a large and luxurious meal, but sits drinking coffee when his girl friend appears. Waiters, Carver thought, have a vocabulary of body language which is individual but international.
“Tell me about my man,” he said.
Amy lit a Gauloise jaune and puffed the rank smoke at him with a grin.
“Smoke if you wish,” she said. “It will not spoil my food. Tonight, nothing could spoil my food.”
“Why?”
“Today, for the first time in my professional life, I achieved the perfect coup. But perfect.”
Her manner was totally different, and Carver watched her warily. Until now, she had been like a lovely business machine. Efficient and good to look at, but about as warm and cuddly as a filing cabinet. Now, she was roguish, relaxed, and flirtatious. Like a woman, he thought, who has heard that her husband has gone on a business trip and that she is therefore at liberty to dine with her lover without having to rush away.
“What happened?”
“You know the type who killed himself at Sacré-Coeur yesterday?”
“I remember,” said Carver drily.
“His name was Nasri. Ahmed Nasri. I have been looking for him for many months. And in the end he comes to me. Just like that!”
She clapped her hands to show her delight, and the waiter appeared like a summoned genie and put upon the table a high wire framework, on which he balanced a vast plate of seaweed and ice. Embedded in the mixture was a selection of seafood. Carver noted with interest that there was a dozen oysters in the selection. Women who enjoyed their food, he maintained, usually also enjoyed their other appetites.
“And?” he prompted.
“Nasri,” she said indistinctly through her first oyster, “works for a man called LeCorbiere, who has business interests in the Cap d’Agde. That is to say he has a large villa there, with a yacht and even keeps a small private air craft at Beziers.”
“And?”
“A lot of Arab friends who often go to stay with him.”
Carver’s interest switched sharply from Amy’s cleavage to LeCorbiere’s customers.
“Go on.”
“Harry,” she said, cracking a lobster claw and dipping the tip of the exposed meat into a dish of mayonnaise, “Harry, just how much do you know about the slave business in this country?”
“Not much,” he said. “I know they kidnap kids in England, rush them across France and then sell them in Africa.”
She waved her lobster pick at him dismissively.
“Wrong,” she said, and patted her mouth with her napkin. “You do not know little. You know nothing. Listen. The scouts find the children. Some come from Yugoslavia, some from Italy, some from ... oh, from all over the world. Few from Britain. Fewer still from Germany or Scandinavia. They do not make good slaves, those. But the British and the Germans and the Scandinavians are the best blondes. And blondes sell well in Morocco and Algeria. So there is a high premium on a properly groomed and trained blonde. Either sex.”
The waiter put a second Armagnac by Carver’s plate, and Amy attacked a half crab with ferocity, and a set of even white teeth. She looked like a hungry kitten.
“But slaves are taken for different reasons. Some are taken to work. Gypsies in Eastern Europe have been selling children – either their own or somebody else’s – for centuries, and they sell them still.”
“Their own children?” The Armagnac felt suddenly sour on his stomach.
“Do not look so superior. Perhaps you have never been that desperate, but others have.”
Carver remembered the well in Beirut.
“I’ve been desperate,” he said. “I still didn’t sell any kids. Go on.”
She sipped at her wine and stared at him for a moment, thoughtfully.
“Anyway,” she said. “Some children go into the sweat shops. It doesn’t just happen in Africa and Asia; there are factories in Naples and even in Rome where the workers are under twelve years old. Then there are the thieves. When Dickens wrote about Fager he was telling the truth. Nothing has changed.”
“Fagin,” he said.
“Fager, Fagin! It is the same. You know what I mean!” she said angrily, and stared haughtily back when heads turned at the next table.
“They are the small change of the market. The draught animals. The workers. Then there is the other end of the market. The ... luxury trade. The bespoke tailoring of the world of slaves. The sex industry.”
“Yeah,” said Carver. “Somehow, I thought we would get round to that.”
“That is a very different proposition,” said Amy, and put her last oyster shell back onto the plate. The waiter, vigilant as a robin on a spade, whipped it away and brought her fish.
“The sex end of the market is where the real money is,” she said, piling chips onto the side plate, and pouring herself a glass of Perrier.
“The girls or boys are taken from, say, Britain. They are always children who have lost all their family, or whose family has apparently lost interest in them. But orphans are preferred. Your social services are good, of course, but they cannot care as much as a mother. Or a father.” She shot him a glance from under her thick, dark eyebrows. “Or a step father?”
He nodded, and helped himself to one of her cigarettes with an interrogative glance. She nodded, impatiently.
“Smoke, smoke. It will not affect me, and they” – she indicated the diners at the next table – “they are smoking already.”
Carver had not thought of them, but he tried to look as though he had already noticed. The cigarette tasted marginally worse than his cheroots, but he needed a smoke.
“The children are brought here in ones and twos. They are told they are on their way to a holiday, perhaps. A charitable organisation is taking them away for a while to help them get over their loss, perhaps. They are well treated. They stay in nice houses and sleep in clean beds and eat good food. They have lessons, of course. They learn languages, culture, they learn about arts. They are individually tutored, and life is very sweet. As they progress, they move down through France. Some go out again through Spain. Some are kept here. They live in gites during the off-peak season, moving from one area to another. Never staying too long in any one place, but always staying with the same people. You must remember, these are not captives. Or if they are, they do not know that they are. They are children at their most vulnerable. Their most malleable. They have been bereaved, they need friends and comfort, and they get both in great profusion.”
She poured herself more wine. He noticed that her mischievous air of self satisfaction had gone. She looked strained.
“But they are going through a system. A system which lasts perhaps for months. In some cases for a year or more. They are being ... groomed. Prepared for the market like pedigree horses. And the market is where they finish up. After one final lesson.”
Carver stubbed out the cigarette and lit another.
“Go on.”
“There is a sale. A big sale. The customers come from all over the world. Oh, nothing as crude as you see on the movies. No slab for the slaves to stand on. No shouted bids and rattling chains. These are rich men. Really rich men. Yachts and private planes rich men.”
“I’ll bet.” The flat tones had a vicious ring and she glanced at him sharply. There was a hard glitter to his eyes which made her scalp suddenly tighten.
“They
meet, they mix with the girls – and boys – and they are charming to them. ‘Would you like to come end work for me?’ Or: ‘My son is a charming young men, but very lonely. Come and visit him at our villa in Marrakesh, or Capri, or wherever...’ It is a hard thing to look beyond the charm and the luxury. When you are young and have been left all alone and suddenly here are all these people who have been so kind to you, and here they have found you a wonderful life for the future. And by now you are used to the luxury yourself. The young adapt quickly. It is not hard to become accustomed to silk when you have always considered linen a luxury.”
“So you say they are willing slaves?”
“They do not yet know that they are slaves. Not yet. Slavery is not just a physical state. It is mental, too. There must be the acceptance of the slave status. With some it comes soon, during the grooming and training, an unconscious thing. But with the others it must be taught.”
“With violence, I presume.”
“With pain, yes, but not always with violence. Sometimes, a lesson has to be taught. It has to be a lesson so terrible that it will never be forgotten. The kind of lesson you wake up in the night screaming about.”
He watched her, fascinated. There was a faint sheen of sweat on her upper lip, sparkling among the dark downy hairs there. Her pupils were grossly enlarged. But they looked inwards, to places he could not guess at.
“What?”
She blinked and looked at him – a strange, wild look which had guilt in it. And fear.
“Eh?”
“What is the lesson, Amy?”
“Oh,” she said, tackling her food again. “It is death, of course. They take one of the slaves. One who will not accept will not conform, and they kill him or her before the rest. After that, there is acceptance. Like wild horses, they are broken. Usually.”
“If they are not broken?”
She shrugged. “They are. But if still they resist, they are kept, as the subject for the next lesson. A lesson will always be needed, you see. But it is expensive to the slave master. The training has been long and costly. To throw away the months and the work is not economic. It is bad business, and they are good businessmen, them. Very good.”
She put down her fork, broke some bread and ate a pellet, and then mopped up some of the butter and herbs from her plate with the rest of “Coffee” she told the waiter. “And one of these.” She nodded at Carver’s glass, and he ordered the same again for himself.
“And this man LeCorbiere?”
“He is a master. He runs the routes through France, and supervises the sales. Usually they are on the Mediterranean coast. No trouble with transport or with bringing the customer in contact with the product, hey?”
“How do we get him to talk?”
“We do not. But Ahmed Nasri had a girl. I know where she is. Soon, we will go and talk to her. She will tell us where LeCorbiere’s next sale is. Also when.”
She seemed very certain what the late Ahmed Nasri’s girl would do, thought Carver. But he kept his thought to himself. One way or another, he promised himself, the widow Nasri was certainly going to talk.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
In the event, he was due for a shock. He had been expecting an Arab girl, with hennaed hair and a good deal of cheap jewellery and a strong smell of musk and sweat.
But what was awaiting them in the little apartment off the Rue des Martyrs, was a true old fashioned poule de luxe.
“Mlle. Fahad” said the card above the bell push, and a husky voice invited him upstairs when he announced that he had been sent by a mutual friend. The groundwork, Amy assured him, had already been done. His bona fides had been checked and guaranteed, blowing half a dozen police contacts for this one important coup.
“You don’t just drop in on a poule de luxe,” she said through a cloud of cigarette smoke. “You have to be introduced. And even then, she’ll want to talk to you for a long time before she decides if you can actually become one of her good friends.” She said it with a twist of the lips which made quite clear what she thought of the oldest profession. Maybe it was her police training, Carver thought. Most women were a good deal more tolerant of prostitutes than Amy seemed.
Djamalla Fahad was a blonde. The most dramatic blonde he had ever seen.
Her hair was tightly cropped against a handsome skull, like a sheath of beaten platinum. Her skin was the creamy peach oolour of a carefully cultured white rose. Her makeup, exotically laid into the corners of her eyes, was multi ooloured and metallic, and her high, proud cheekbones needed no hint of blusher. Her long neck was sheathed with a heavy heavy copper and silver collar, and below it her shoulders were naked and perfect.
She was wearing an evening dress. The top was a tube of copper and silver sequins and the skirt a whispering sheet of black silk which clung to her hips like wet cotton, and parted as she walked to show the merest glimpse of her calf. On her feet were high heeled black sandals.
She looked like a model on an evening out with a maharajah; desirable but unavailable. Yet.
“A drink?” she said, and poured him champagne from an opened bottle. On a table in the exact centre of the pool of light from a low-set lamp stood her own half empty glass. Within the crystal flute, the bubbles drew lines of light through the golden wine.
Music was playing from a stacker system near the window, and the lighting – save for the one standing lamp – was discreetly dim.
The room was like her. Exotic, exciting, and very, very expensive. Somewhere at the back of Carver’s mind, some very dark instincts raised their muzzles and began to howl.
The girl collected her own glass, and walked across the room to relax in a vast puffy armchair. Every movement was a work of art, from the slow grace of the flowing turn to the moment when, as she sat down, the whole of one long leg was for a split second exposed. Then she was still, a beautifully composed portrait in a perfectly calculated setting.
Carver grunted, deep in his throat, tossed back the champagne and deliberately moved from the settee where she had placed him to another armchair further from the light. From her seat, he knew, she would not be able to see his face in the dimmed lighting, merely the outline of his head against the lighter wall behind.
A flicker of expressionlessness across the superb face confirmed his guess. The sooner he got to grips with this problem, the safer he would be. This was no gullible girl merely waiting for a visit from a prospective customer.
The large, violet eyes watched him gravely across the murmuring room.
“Tell me about yourself,” she said. “I was told that Charles sent you, and that you are a friend of Gideon.”
“Uhuh,” he said. From where she sat he reasoned that there must he some alarm system which would normally connect her with a protector, just in case. Surely, no prostitute, no matter how expensive, would allow herself to be alone and unprotected with a new client from choice.
On the other hand, her former protector was currently dead.
Had she had time to recruit someone else? If so, would she call for him at the first unexpected move?
“How about another li’l drink, kid?” he said, in a Chicago accent which would have frightened Al Capone. She rose from her chair like engine oil in a television commercial and flowed across to the ice bucket to bring him the bottle, and once she was safely away from the chair, he moved himself.
He met her on the way across the room, took the glass from her hand and kissed her, gently, on the shoulder.
“A moment,” she said coolly. She unwound his hand from her waist, and stepped back.
“You go too fast and you presume too much, my friend,” she told him. “We do not know each other yet. Talk to me a while and let us see what we shall see,” she gave him a smoky smile and a peck on the cheek and led him back towards the settee, but he stepped aside and dropped into the chair she had chosen for herself instead.
“No harm in you sitting on my knee while we talk is there, kid?
” he grated, and watched her wince at the invitation. The meeting was plainly not going as planned.
“I will ... stay here,” she said and arranged herself along the settee. She did not seem as discomfited as he had expected, so maybe she had panic buttons all over the flat. Or maybe the place was bugged and the unseen protector simply came bursting through the door when the conversation hit a sour note.
It was going to be necessary to make the conversation hit a sour note to find out where – if anywhere – the pimp was hiding.
He assumed the kind of smile which makes a woman’s fillings itch and intensified the accent.
“Okay, baby, you wanna talk? Talk, then. Where do ya come from?”
“From the Bois de Boulogne. My parents were very rich,” she said with a smoothness which betrayed long practise. “My father was a ship owner from Morocco and my mother was a countess from Poland.”
“Oh, yeah? And you just thought you’d try screwing for a living because you weren’t trained for anything,” Carver sneered. “Bullshit, baby, and we both know it! Your parents probably only knew each other for half an hour, but boy they scored a bullseye when it came to genes, kid! They had one hell of a beautiful daughter. Now come here and fool around a bit!”
Her face set like a miracle sweet, and she stood up.
“I think you have misunderstood the basis of your visit, monsieur,” she said coldly. “I ask you to leave immediately, or I shall call the concierge and have you thrown out. Good night.”
Still no sign of the Seventh Cavalry? How lucky, thought Carver, can an Injun get? He decided to make one more try at surprising the muscle out of the woodwork.
He moved across the room to confront her and she eluded him easily and slapped his face. The slap, though expected, was very much harder than he bargained for. It was delivered much more quickly, too.
He cursed loudly and grabbed again. This time he saw the slap coming, and went with it. It still hurt, and she kicked at him viciously, knocking ever a table with a crash.
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