Corsican Death (7 page)

“You’ll need help from this end,” said Craven. “Want Kramer?”

Bolt smiled. “Better believe it.” Kramer, a black agent, worked out of New York and was one of Bolt’s favorite people. Kramer. Street-smart and cool, together and tough, a former schoolteacher in a southern all-black school, teaching six subjects for five thousand dollars a year until he decided he could do a lot better, and should, before he got much older.

Yeah, my man K. will do just fine. Gotta tell him he’ll be a big New York dope man and he’s getting a trip to Paris out of it. He’ll dig it.

“Maybe Masetta, too,” said Bolt. Masetta was also out of New York, a short, stocky Italian agent who laughed a lot, lived in Brooklyn with a wife and three kids, and who hated Italian food but loved women with big legs. Two good agents, two good men.

If Bolt had to put his ass on the line—that was the name of the game in undercover work—then he couldn’t think of two better men to back him up. There were more details to be worked out of course, and Bolt had to telephone Paris and speak to Lamazère and Dinard, to let them know he was coming and to keep quiet about it.

But five days! Not enough time. He
knew
it. Just not enough time. But it would have to do, because Craven wouldn’t budge from some things, and this seemed to be one of them.

“O.K., Bolt,” he said, standing up and taking a deep breath. “I’ve got to go and make arrangements for the money and iron out a few other details which you probably won’t think are too important. You wait here. I’ll be back.”

When Craven left the room, Bolt slumped back in his chair, collapsing with an aching tiredness. Fucking Craven. Five days. Asshole. What the hell did he think Bolt was going over there for, a goddamn vacation?

The other men in the room relaxed, taking out cigarettes, breathing normally, glad most of the show was over. That Bolt. Jesus, he made life exciting, didn’t he, folks? Sure.

Weaver was standing over Bolt’s chair, looking down, his fleshy brown face sad as a basset hound’s. “You look like you sittin’ bare-ass on broken glass.”

“Craven,” said Bolt. One word. As if it contained pages of detailed criticism.

“Ain’t that way, brother John.” Weaver’s voice was smooth, deep, and he spoke as though he were a father giving his kid his first lesson on how to fish. “He cares. The man cares. Five days sounds like he’s pushin’, that maybe he don’t want you to rock the boat and get some people mad. But what he sayin’ is that in five days Alain Lonzu hits France and some bad people are gonna be around him. His brother, Remy, cats like that. And some of their friends. You know what that means to you? Means your ass get blown away if you get unlucky. Means you get killed, man. Craven ain’t bein’ mean, he bein’ sensible.”

Shit. All of a sudden it hit Bolt. Craven
wasn’t
being a prick, he was just trying to cut down the odds on an undercover narcotics agent getting his head blown off, and Bolt was so hot and bothered he never noticed that. Shit.

Bolt exhaled. Yeah, it was true. After five days, things would be goddamn tougher than they were now, and that was bad enough. For a few minutes Bolt had had only one thing on his mind—winning.

He hadn’t thought of losing, of the danger, of the viciousness of the Corsicans.

Craven. He did his job, did it his way, and well.

So did Bolt, but sometimes neither one knew this about the other.

Bolt looked up at Weaver’s sad face. “Guess you’re right, brother man. Craven does it the only way he knows how.”

“Different strokes for different folks,” said Weaver, wondering if white people would ever learn that you couldn’t have it your way all the time.

“S
TUPID BASTARD! YOU DON’T
tell me,
I
tell you, understand? I don’t care who you are. We do what I say, you hear me?” Alain Lonzu’s throat was raw from shouting, and had he been wiser, he would have known that his anger was weakening him. At the moment, he didn’t care about anything except teaching Hubert Girons an important lesson.

Girons, the quiet, bearded captain of the
La Rochelle,
knew what that lesson was. He, Girons, was the ship’s captain, ruler over the men serving under him, ruler over the ship under his feet. But Alain Lonzu ruled him, and as hard as it was to accept that, Girons knew he would
have
to accept it and do as Lonzu wanted. Lonzu, bleeding and in pain, shouting and cursing at anyone who came near him, wanted the ship to change course.

And Girons, flat, bearded face without expression, a forty-four-year-old man who had worked his way up from cabin boy to captain of this very ship, knew that in the end he would do as Alain Lonzu ordered. He hated obeying another man on his ship, hated Lonzu for forcing him to jump in front of his own crew, as much as he hated himself for giving in to all of this.

But Girons
would
give in, because Count Lonzu could have him tortured and killed, a fact Alain had brought up more than once in the past few hours. So far, the ship was on course for France, making good time over a smooth, calm sea. What was not calm was the bleeding, abusive Alain Lonzu.

“I want a doctor. Can’t you see I’m in pain?” he yelled, face red and perspiring, blood-soaked bandages a dull red around his waist and right arm. There was no doctor on the small freighter. Alain yanked off the bandage around his head, exposing an ugly purple-and-red bruise on his forehead over his left eye. Pain chewed at his body like a hunger-crazed dog. His back felt as though the pain had always been there, and he could hardly move his right arm.

Captain Girons sat in a small chair across from Alain, his eyes calm. Pride made him decide to do little right now, because he knew that whatever he did or said could be overruled by this muscle-bound, screaming idiot sitting across from him at a red card table. Girons’s pride would be stepped on, something he’d had a lot of since Lonzu had come on board.

You don’t keep a crew in line if they see you pushed around, though perhaps they understood that a man who could order your death could at the very least also order you to kiss his ass. Like now.

“I’ve got friends in London,” said Alain, chest heaving with fatigue brought on by nerves, fear, and a losing battle with pain all over his body. Had the bleeding stopped? Shit, he wasn’t sure. All he was sure of was that he was impatient to land somewhere,
anywhere,
get a doctor quick, and stop this fucking agony that was raking him from head to toe.

You have
friends,
thought Girons. Bullshit. You have people who are afraid of you or whom you have bought. You have people who are afraid of your brother. People like me, God forgive me.

“I’ll have to radio ahead,” said Girons calmly, speaking with his eyes on the bleeding man. Let him see I’m not afraid to look him in the eye.

“No you don’t,” shouted Alain, jabbing a stiff forefinger at Girons as though it were a knife. “You just
do
it, that’s all. Change course. You don’t have to tell France we’re not coming. I—”

“It wasn’t France I had in mind,” said Girons, still keeping his voice level and his eyes on Lonzu’s contorted, tensed face. “Though I must say we’ll have to tell them something, because they’re expecting us. What I had in mind is radioing London when we’re in range, and telling them we’re docking. We have to—”

“Like hell we have to!” Alain pounded the card table for emphasis, making it jump, making glasses and plates go up in the air and come down hard. He wanted to kill this flat-faced bastard. Maybe he would when the trip was over, but right now Girons had to run the ship and keep the crew in line.

“If we don’t, France will think we’ve got trouble and maybe send search ships looking for us. I’m sure you don’t want that. And if we don’t tell London we’re coming in, they’ll think we’ve got trouble, and we’ll be greeted by some official people you might not want to see.”

Alain Lonzu kept quiet, frowning, his pain-racked brain trying to grab on to a piece of what Girons had just said to him. Lonzu wanted things his way, but something about what the captain had just said to him made sense. Yes, it did.

Alain nodded again and again, breathing loudly, nostrils flaring, his eyes burning into Girons, who was getting nervous and tried to hide it by folding his hands in his lap and twirling his thumbs.

“O.K., captain, we radio when we get closer. But you understand something: nothing better happen to me, and
you
know why. My brother never forgets, and I’m sure you know what that means. It means you’re dead if I don’t walk off this ship and see my brother. You’re dead.”

Girons licked his lips, suddenly realizing he’d been holding his breath and leaning back in the chair as though to move farther away from Alain Lonzu. The Count owned the
La Rochelle,
and Girons had no choice but to follow orders if he wanted to continue as ship’s captain. These days few men were ship’s captains, and for a young orphan boy who had eaten garbage in Marseilles’s streets to keep from starving to death, Hubert Girons had come a long way.

He wanted to stay captain almost as much as he wanted to stay alive. Sighing, he raised his hands from his lap, letting them fall back on his thick thighs. A gesture of defeat.

“Everything will be all right, you’ll see. It’ll be all right.”

Alain’s twisted smile was ugly as he reached over with his left hand, keeping his eyes on Girons while pressing the hand onto Girons’s white shirt, feeling the man stiffen under the touch and seeing him fight for control as Alain wiped blood on the shirt. The smile, still ugly, was there as Alain said, “That’s
my
blood. Go on, look at it. Now, if everything is
not
all right,
your
blood will be there, you understand?”

Girons, lips pressed tightly together, jaw trembling with fear and shame, his face burning with savage embarrassment, said nothing.

“Captain, I asked you a question: I said do you understand?” Alain, like those with any power or advantage, used it.

Girons nodded, his head jerking stiffly, as though he were a puppet. And the harsh truth was that he was. But in his mind he made a note.

Girons, proud as those are who rise from nothing, had been pushed too far this time. The humiliation by Alain had been too much, and Girons, a Corsican, vowed that one day he would have his revenge on this bleeding bastard. The captain’s voice was low, almost inaudible. “I understand. I do.”

F
RANCE.

Eighty miles an hour. Speeding down an empty highway at eighty miles an hour, 6:45 on a chilly morning, bouncing around in the back seat of a small French taxi, his body tired and aching from a seven-hour night flight from Washington, D.C., to Orly Field in Paris. Shit, thought John Bolt, that’s just the
good,
news. The bad news is that the taxi was in midair—it had just hit a bump in the road—and all four wheels were off the ground.

My ass, thought Bolt. The fucking Frenchman’s driving like he’s the Red Baron.

In the seconds left to him before the taxi slammed back down into the highway, Bolt shoved his legs straight out, pressing hard against the base of the seat in front of him. Both hands were tightly entwined with a strap near the window on his right, the best white-knuckle grip the narc could come up with on short notice. Bolt was wide awake now. Oh yeah.

Wham!

The taxi banged into the highway, swerved into another lane, miraculously empty at this hour of the morning, and tires squealing, straightened out and kept speeding toward Paris.

Bolt, eyes wide, mouth open, heart scraping his ribs, let the air explode from him, chest collapsing. Shaking his head slowly in nervous anger, he yelled in French, “Jean-Paul, you bastard! If I had wanted to take a plane to my hotel lobby, I would have taken a fucking plane to my hotel lobby! Jesus Christ, you can take your death wish and shove it up your fat French ass! Slow this fucking piece of junk down, goddamn it!”

Jean-Paul Lamazère, forty-two, tall and packed with pink flesh from years of eating his own gourmet cooking, wrinkled his big nose, grinning slowly with a mouth that consisted almost entirely of one thick lower lip. Jean-Paul was enjoying himself. “Get out and walk, you lazy American bastard.” But he eased his huge foot off the accelerator, eyeing the speedometer as it dropped to one hundred and ten kilometers—sixty-eight miles an hour.

John Bolt breathed loudly through his open mouth, slowly shaking his head from side to side, feeling himself calm down and relax as touches of hot anger and cold fear crawled away from him. His stomach was sliding down from his throat now, heading for its rightful place. Hallelujah.

Shit, he liked Jean-Paul Lamazère, but something seemed to snap in that son-of-a-bitch’s head every time he slid behind the wheel of a car. Like most Frenchmen, Jean-Paul was a rotten driver, and like most rotten drivers, he thought he was good. “Tell you something, Jean-Paul. I’d let an alligator chew on my dick before I’d ride around with you again. When am I ever going to learn that you can’t drive, any more than you can give birth to twins? Shit, you get worse the older you get, you know that?”

“Italian drivers are worse,” said Jean-Paul, shrugging his thick shoulders, his eyes on the road. “An Italian driver will run over a pregnant nun.”

“Serves her right. You’re looking good, you fat bastard, did I tell you that? Shit, I’m so tired I don’t know what the fuck’s going on. Yeah, you’re looking good. Eating your own cooking … and speaking of eating, you’re probably getting more ass than a toilet seat.”

Bolt’s red-rimmed eyes looked into the rear-view mirror, locking with Jean-Paul’s large brown eyes and the saggy pink bags under them. Pink bags and thick black eyebrows. Colorful and ugly.

Yeah, Jean-Paul Lamazère was sure ugly to look at. Six feet four inches, overweight, big nose, a mouth with only one lip, a thick lower lip at that, and some people thought it was a kindness to describe the huge French cop as one of God’s bad jokes. That was their mistake. He was smart, tough, incorruptible, in a country where the police force could be bought too often for too little.