‘I’m sorry for the trouble,’ he said to the staring auburn-haired woman, then turned and began walking away.
‘Wait!’ she called after him. ‘What’s your name?’
That just beat everything. Ben could hear the commotion as he made his retreat, but didn’t look back. Turning the corner, he broke into a jog. His nerves were jangling badly. Not because of the fight. It was as if some huge, gaping wound inside him, which he’d thought had healed, had been ripped back open again even worse than before and his whole being was gushing out of it, draining him right down to the marrow.
A hundred yards up the twisting narrow street, he settled back down to a fast walk. The jangling wasn’t wearing off, but becoming more intense. His thoughts and emotions were flying around inside him in so many directions at once that he could hardly even see where he was going. All he could see was Brooke’s face. He kept going. Crossed the street without looking, heard the urgent blast of a car horn and ignored it. He wouldn’t have cared if a bus had mown him down. Let it.
Four minutes later, he was inside another bistro. He walked straight up to the bar.
‘What’ll it be, monsieur?’ the barman asked.
‘Scotch,’ Ben said.
‘Which one?’ the barman said, motioning at a row of bottles.
‘I don’t care. You choose.’
‘Water?’
‘As it comes.’
The barman poured out a glass. It was empty almost the moment it touched the bar.
‘Leave the bottle,’ Ben said.
It was going to be a long day and an even longer night. But nothing in comparison to what would come later.
The first thing Ben saw on awakening was the stained Artexed ceiling above him. With some effort, he shifted his gaze to look down the length of his body and saw that he was lying in a bed. He closed his eyes. For a few disorientated moments, it seemed to him that he was tucked up in his bunk in the safe haven of the monastery. That the discomfiting fragments of memory playing at the edges of his mind were all just a bad dream.
Except that they weren’t. He opened his eyes and realised that he wasn’t dreaming about the sour taste in his mouth or the thudding headache of a serious whisky hangover. Wedging himself up in the bed to peer at his surroundings, it also occurred to him that his cell at the Chartreuse de la Sainte Vierge de Pelvoux wasn’t decorated with peeling posters of naked women and filled with bodybuilding equipment. A long bar resting on a flat weight bench was sagging with enough iron to make Ben’s muscles hurt just looking at it.
Nor did his cell contain a wall-mounted rack full of guns. Confusing.
Ben’s watch said it was 7.47 a.m. He climbed out of the rumpled bed and felt the full force of the hangover wash over him. He was still fully dressed. The bed was beside a small window. While his cell looked out over a sweeping eagle’s-view vista, all that could be seen from here was the bare brick wall of a neighbouring building. He peered down and saw an alleyway, empty but for a couple of wheelie bins.
He threaded his way between the bench press set-up and stacks of weights over to the gun rack. They weren’t replicas. He took one down. AK-47. Romanian, with a folding stock and unloaded thirty-round curved steel magazine. Old, but well looked after, the metal parts covered in a light sheen of oil.
Ben thought, Hmm.
He replaced the weapon on the rack and looked at the one below it. It was a FAMAS rifle, service weapon of the French army for the last thirty years or more. FAMAS stood for Fusil d’Assaut de la Manufacture d’Armes de Saint-Étienne. It was a strange-looking contraption, built on the design concept the military designated ‘bullpup’, with the receiver placed behind the pistol grip and trigger unit instead of in front of it. It was a way of creating an automatic weapon that was short and handy without sacrificing too much in the way of barrel length. Some hated it, some loved it. To Ben’s eye the thing looked ungainly, but he knew it did the job it was built to do. This one was standard military issue with the twenty-five-round straight magazine, even fitted with the regulation bayonet.
The real question was what one of these was doing in the room with him. Ben was beginning to wonder now if he’d fallen down a cosmic wormhole and woken up in a parallel universe.
He tentatively left the room and found himself at the end of a narrow passage he was certain he’d never seen before. He followed the beat of rock music and the scent of fresh coffee to a door at the other end, and swung it open.
The other side of the door was a small kitchen. Seated alone at a scarred pine table, listening to a radio and holding a mug that said ULTIMATE WARRIOR, his host in this strange place flashed him a brilliant smile. Suddenly, Ben’s fragmented memory was beginning to slot miserably back together.
‘Hey, big man,’ his host chuckled in French, rising to greet his guest. Maybe he was being modest. Six-six at the very least, with skin the colour of burnished ebony, he wasn’t the smallest Nigerian guy Ben had ever seen. He made the muscle-bound oaf Ben had beaten up the day before look like a dwarf. He was somewhere in his late forties, his hair grizzled at the temples. A tattered Gold’s Gym T-shirt showed off his weightlifter’s shoulders and powerful, vein-laced arms.
Ben stared at him, struggling to recall the name. ‘Omar,’ he said at last.
The dazzling grin widened. ‘Brother, I’m surprised you remember a fucking thing.’
Ben slumped in a wooden chair. ‘That’s about all I do remember.’ But the rest was slowly coming back. He wasn’t sure he wanted it to.
Omar filled in the missing pieces with obvious amusement. How he and his bar-room buddies had found a new drinking companion the previous evening when this already toasted English guy had wandered into their regular haunt clutching the remains of a bottle of scotch. It had turned into quite a night.
‘Did I say anything?’
‘Just kept rambling on about some woman. You got it bad, my friend. I know how that goes, believe me.’
‘Nobody got hit, did they?’ Ben dared to ask. He looked at his knuckles. No sign of fresh bruising, and they didn’t hurt. Still, that didn’t prove anything.
‘Didn’t get that far,’ Omar told him with a booming laugh. ‘Not quite. Shit, I never saw anyone put away that much whisky before. Me and the boys were taking bets on when you’d drop, man. Incredible.’
‘Yeah, it’s a real talent,’ Ben muttered. ‘I hope you won your bet.’
Omar shook his head, still beaming. ‘Nah. You cost me big time.’
‘Sorry to hear it. Did you bring me back here?’
‘Wasn’t going to leave you lying in the gutter for the cops to scrape up, now was I?’
‘I appreciate that, Omar.’
‘Hey,
