A Foreign Country (20 page)

‘Of course!’ It sounded as though she was calling from a residential street. Kell heard the wasp buzz of a passing moped, the larger echo of the city. ‘So you would like to meet for dinner, as we talked about? Are you free? I can take you to have
la bouillabaisse
.’

‘Sounds great. I’d love to. I’ve just checked into a hotel …’

‘… Oh, which one? Where are you?’

Kell told her, because he had no choice in the matter. Luc and his pals would now have a fix on his position and would surely lose no opportunity in taking another crack at Kell’s laptop. Though he was certain that the computer could not incriminate him, he would have to carry it with him and remove anything sensitive from his room whenever he left the building.

‘I’ve got no idea what street it’s on,’ he said. ‘A cab dropped me at the edge of the Arab quarter, about half a mile from the station …’

‘Never mind,’ Madeleine interrupted. ‘I can find it. I will come to pick you up at seven o’clock and we can walk to Chez Michel. It’s on the other side of the port. Not far.’

‘Seven o’clock,’ Kell confirmed.

That gave him five hours. After eating lunch in a café two blocks from the hotel, Kell returned to his room and used the telephone beside his bed to ring the backstop number for Uniacke’s family, a line that existed solely as an answering service for the benefit of snooping spooks. Kell heard the pre-recorded voice of a female colleague at SIS masquerading as Uniacke’s wife.

Hello. You’ve reached Stephen and Caroline Uniacke. We’re not at home at the moment, but if you’d like to leave a message for us, or for Bella and Dan, please speak after the beep.

Kell did what he had to do.

Hi, sweetheart, it’s me. Are you there? Pick up if you are.
[An appropriate pause]
OK. I just got off the boat and wanted to see how you are. I’m going to stay in Marseille tonight, then perhaps stop off in Paris on the way home. There’s a client I want to see, but he doesn’t know whether he’s going to be in town. I might get a flight back to London tomorrow and be home for supper or I might be in Paris for a couple of days. Anyway, I’ll let you know. Beautiful weather here, going for bouillabaisse tonight. Call my mobile if you get the chance or try the hotel. Cheaper that way. It’s the Montand. I’m in room 316.

He left the number of the hotel, blew a kiss to his phantom wife, told her that he loved her and that he missed ‘Bella and Dan’, then hung up and changed into a fresh shirt.

Five minutes later, carrying his laptop and mobile phones in a shoulder bag, Kell was en route to La Cité Radieuse, a Marseille landmark for architecture buffs, and the perfect place for the auto-didact in him to kill a couple of hours before meeting Madeleine at seven. The twenty-something cab driver he flagged down on Rue de la Republique was new in town and had never heard of Le Corbusier, so Kell put him in the picture.

‘Every tower block in the world, every thirty-storey high-rise built to house the urban working class in the last sixty years, looks like it does because of the Cité Radieuse.’

‘It’s true?’ The driver was looking at Kell in his rear-view mirror, eyes narrowed against the sun. It was hard to tell if he was interested or just being polite.

‘It’s true. From Sheffield to Sao Paulo, if you grew up on the tenth floor of a concrete housing scheme, Le Corbusier put you there.’

‘I grew up outside Lyon,’ said the driver. ‘My father owns a shop,’ which was where the more enlightened section of their conversation ended. Thereafter he was intent only on talking about football, pointing out the Stade Velodrome on Boulevard Michelet, home to Olympique de Marseille, and complaining that Karim Benzema, once the darling of Lyon’s supporters, had ‘whored himself to Real Madrid’. Moments later the driver had dropped Kell at the entrance to the Cité Radieuse.

‘This is it?’ he said, peering up at the building with evident suspicion. ‘Looks like every other fucking tower in Marseille.’

‘Exactly,’ Kell replied. Two hundred metres back along the road, two men on mopeds had pulled over on Boulevard Michelet. Kell was certain that he had seen one of the drivers, wearing a blue crash helmet, tailing the cab on Place Castellane. The two mopeds disappeared out of sight down a side street and Kell paid the driver.

‘Good to talk to you,’ he said.

The Cité Radieuse was situated in a small, poorly maintained municipal garden, set back from Boulevard Michelet behind a screen of trees. Kell found the entrance and was soon in the third-floor restaurant eating a sandwich and drinking a cup of coffee. This section of the building operated both as an upmarket boutique hotel and as an area in which visitors to the complex could look at examples of Le Corbusier’s work. The rest of Cité Radieuse was still a fully functioning apartment building, complete with a rooftop kindergarten and a row of shops. Kell, breaking a minor law of trespass, took an interior staircase to one of the upper storeys so that he could snoop around without feeling like a tourist.

This was a mistake. Emerging into a long, black-red corridor, dark as a throat, he found himself entirely alone, with little sound except the occasional murmur of a television or radio in one of the apartments. Halfway down the corridor, which was blocked off at the far end, Kell heard a noise behind him and turned to see two young Arab men in tracksuits moving towards him. He thought immediately of the moped drivers. One of them, brandishing a metal pole said, in English: ‘Hello, mister, can we help you?’ but Kell was under no illusion that they were residents. La Cité Radieuse was too affluent for a couple of migrant kids in tracksuits to be renting an apartment.

‘I don’t think so,’ he said, replying in French but already setting his shoulder bag on the ground so that he could move and react more freely. ‘I’m just looking around. Big fan of Corbusier.’

‘What have you got with you?’ said the older of the two men, nodding at Kell’s bag. Kell saw the glint of a knife in his left hand, the blade briefly catching the dull yellow glow of a light in the doorway of an apartment.

‘Why?’ he replied. ‘What’s on your mind?’

Nothing more was said. They came for him. Kell picked up the bag and threw it very quickly across the floor, hard enough that the man with the knife was briefly knocked off balance. Rather than turn to retaliate, however, the man moved several paces back down the corridor and picked up the bag, leaving his friend to fight alone. The second Arab was older, but shorter and more agile than the first. Kell felt the numb slowness of his middle-aged bones as he wheeled to confront him. There was noise now, Kell shouting loudly in French to alert the residents, projecting strength, watching the metal bar and looking constantly for the flash of a second blade. He was effectively trapped at the end of the corridor, with nowhere to turn, no space in which to run. In front of him, about ten metres down the corridor, silhouetted by a distant whitewashed wall reflecting outdoor light, the younger man shouted out: ‘OK, I’ve got it,’ just as his accomplice moved in to strike. Rather than use it as a weapon, he hurled the bar, but Kell had time to duck as it whistled past him, clanging into a door at the back of the corridor. The Arab came at him now, throwing a punch that Kell took in the ribs. He was able to catch his attacker in his momentum, to grab at him. They were thrown to the ground and Kell, drawing on some vague and distant memory of a Fort Monckton fight class, pressed a finger into the man’s left eye and drove it deep into the socket.

‘Let’s go!’ his accomplice shouted. Kell saw the younger man at the edge of his vision, as he drove his hand up into his attacker’s throat, pushing his neck backwards. At the same time, a knee thumped into his groin, slowly and almost without force, but pain was soon shunting into Kell’s gut and spine so that he groaned and swore, again trying to gain a hold on the Arab’s neck. His assailant somehow freed himself, days-old sweat like a taste in Kell’s mouth, and launched a kick directly into his face. Kell brought his arms up around his head, trying to get to his feet, but the younger man had joined them and was standing above him, swearing triumphantly in high-pitched Marseille Arabic and landing heavy kicks repeatedly into Kell’s arms and legs. He was terrified that he would now use the knife.

Just then, a commotion behind them, a door opening in the black-red corridor. There was a voice in the dark.

‘What the fuck is going on?’ a woman shouted in French and the two assailants ran, scooping up the shoulder bag and taking it with them, trainers squeaking on the linoleum. Kell swore after them, defeated and lying on the ground. They had the laptop, the camera, the Marquand mobile, the Uniacke passport. They had everything.

The woman came towards him.

‘Jesus,’ she said. ‘Are you all right?’

There were police, there were paramedics, there were a great many concerned neighbours from all corners of La Cité Radieuse. There was also, of course, the shame of being mugged, that particular sense of humiliation which comes in the aftermath of a thorough defeat. But mostly Kell felt the dread of bureaucracy, of form-filling, of enforced visits to local hospitals, of the pity and fuss of strangers. He was obliged to see a doctor, who issued a Certificat Medicale which confirmed that Kell had suffered no serious physical damage save for a severe bruise on his left bicep and another on his left thigh, both already the colour of aubergines. His right kneecap had swollen slightly and he had a cut above the eye that did not require stitching. Both Claude, the French paramedic who examined him at the scene, and Laurent, the lugubrious police officer who had only that morning arrested ‘
trois putains de beurs
’, recommended that Kell stay overnight and submit to a full medical examination in hospital. You could be in shock, said Claude. You ought to have a blood test, said Laurent. There was no way of knowing if Monsieur Uniacke had sustained internal injuries.

Kell, who had spent exactly one day in bed with illness since the age of fifteen, had always been a firm believer in listening to his own body, rather than to the risk-averse counselling of jaded public servants. On this occasion, his body told him what he wanted to hear: that he would be a little stiff in the morning, a little older, and that the injury to his knee would cause him to limp for several days. Otherwise the fight had damaged no more than his pride. It had also placed Thomas Kell in the awkward position of having to give a sworn Procés-Verbal to the Marseille police in the name of Stephen Uniacke. This was contrary to the spy’s DNA, to every impulse he possessed to keep a low profile when conducting an operation overseas. Yet if the DGSE was going to send two Arab thugs to beat him up, Kell figured he didn’t have much of a choice.

It took less than five minutes in Laurent’s spruce Citroën Xsara to reach police headquarters half a mile away, thanks to the traffic-parting wail of a siren. The building was a sandstone, three-storey Hausmann throwback in an otherwise hyper-modern Marseille suburb with a predictable mix of late-afternoon clientele idling in the lobby: jumpy pickpockets; protesting drug dealers; breathalysed post-lunch businessmen; pensioners with a grudge. Kell was fast-tracked into an office on the second floor and interviewed formally by Laurent and his partner, Alain, a thirty-something hard man with salt-and-pepper stubble and a gleaming firearm, which he touched from time to time, like someone stroking a cat. Kell was asked for a full inventory of his shoulder bag and listed the contents as best he could, well aware that Jimmy Marquand and the beancounters at SIS would require a copy of the official police statement in order to reclaim the laptop and camera on insurance; such was the box-ticking small-mindedness that had overtaken the Service in recent years. After thirty minutes he was taken into a second room and shown a series of mug shots of local North African hoodlums, none of whom matched the descriptions of the two men who had assaulted him. It was already seven o’clock by the time Laurent was satisfied that he had covered every detail of the attack, asking Kell to sign the official ‘Plainte Contre X’ and apologizing, much to Alain’s evident distaste, that ‘as a British tourist’ he had fallen prey to ‘an immigrant crime’. Kell, who was in no doubt that his two assailants had stolen his laptop and phones to order, thanked both policemen for their ‘patience and professionalism’, and asked to be driven back to his hotel as soon as possible so that he could rest before travelling to Paris in the morning.

Laurent was on the point of agreeing when the telephone rang. He picked it up and said: ‘Yes?’ then embarked on what Kell assumed was an internal call. ‘
Oui, oui
,’ the policeman muttered slowly, before a half-smile broke out on his face. Laurent nodded his head and made happy eye contact with Kell. Something had happened.

‘It appears that your bag has been found, Monsieur Uniacke,’ he said, hanging up the phone. ‘It was dropped outside La Cité Radieuse and picked up by a member of the public. One of my fellow officers is bringing it to you now.’

Three minutes later there was a knock at the door and a third police officer walked into the room. He was wearing regulation black boots and a crisp, navy-blue uniform. Like Alain, he carried a firearm on his belt, but looked in every way a more imposing figure, thickset and pitiless. The beard had gone, taking as much as ten years off his face, but Kell recognized the man instantly.

It was Luc.

That Luc had bothered to shave off his beard told Kell everything he needed to know. Malot’s companion from the boat intended to interview him while impersonating a police officer and did not want to run the small risk that Kell would recognize him. He said: ‘
Bonjour
’ in an upbeat fashion, passed the shoulder bag to Laurent, and introduced himself as ‘Benedict Voltaire’, a pseudonym as preposterous as any Kell had ever encountered.

‘So what happened here please?’ he asked in English, settling into a chair that Alain had vacated, as though making way for a visiting dignitary. Kell noted the extra stripe on Luc’s shoulder, outranking his two putative colleagues. He was either a senior police official or, more likely, a French Intelligence officer who had persuaded Laurent and Alain to let him masquerade as a cop.