‘Do you remember what you said to me on the way back to Berlin?’

  Far from appealing to her, he had made her livid. ‘Who the hell do you think you are to start preaching at me?’ She spat the words out at him.

  Camlo squared up, quite the pimp, but Alyosha snarled at him and he backed off.

  ‘I’m worried about you.’

  ‘Find something better to worry about.’

  28.

  Under the canopy of the Palais de Paris, the liveried Cossack was very happy to see him. Andrei Petrovich told him he’d been hoping that Alyosha would call by, because he had some very hopeful news for him.

  ‘Are you listening, Alexei Fyodorovich?’ he asked, pulling a tin of tobacco out of his pocket and taking a pinch to roll himself a cigarette.

  Alyosha answered that he was all ears.

  ‘How would you like to make a bucketful of money?’

  ‘A bucketful or a pocketful?’

  ‘A bucketful.’

  ‘I’d be delighted. Who wouldn’t?’

  ‘Exactly. Five hundred francs a month? How would that suit you?’

  Alyosha blew out a long whistle: that would make him very happy indeed.

  Andrei Petrovich smiled, exposing his blackened teeth, which were rotting in his mouth.

  ‘I thought that would make you prick up your ears.’

  ‘How?’

  By answering the telephone, dealing with correspondence, keeping the diary up to date, the apartment neat and the wardrobe in order – but more importantly, be available twenty-four hours a day.

  ‘For five hundred francs a month, that’s not too much of a sacrifice, is it?’

  ‘It’s a handsome salary.’ It was also an escape from endless dishwashing at the restaurant.

  ‘I’d have gone for it myself if it wasn’t for one thing…’ said Andrei Petrovich.

  ‘What was that?’

  Only a young man was wanted for the job.

  ‘Well, Alexei Fyodorovich? How about it?’

  In his excitement at the possibility of earning so much money, he forgot altogether to mention Galina.

  29.

  At three o’clock in the afternoon, Artyom was standing outside the prison in Marseille, waiting for the small door within the larger one to open. When it did, he followed in the officer’s footsteps, surrounded by the pungent prison smells of vegetables and excrement. Various iron gates were unlocked and locked again until, finally, a heavy door was opened and he entered the damp, dark room within.

  There, under a high window, was a plain oblong table and two wooden benches. Sitting on one of the benches on the far side of the table, in grey clothes and wooden clogs, his head shaved bald, his face gaunt, was L’Oreille, an old acquaintance from his arms-importing days. After telling them they had fifteen minutes, the officer sat on a chair by the door, plaiting his arms and turning his head to the side, the better to eavesdrop.

  The small man asked at once: ‘How did you hear I was here?’

  ‘Doña Rosa told me.’

  The patronne of the Stockholm bar had told Artyom all about L’Oreille’s involvement in the scam to smuggle coffee from Colombia. It had all gone swimmingly to begin with, as the customs officials were easy enough to buy off, the enterprise had been well timed, and the gang all worked well together. Once they thought the deal was in the bag, the gang had had an unforgettable night of drinking. The coffee had all been bagged up, and it would be child’s play to sell it on at a good price with no repercussions.

  After that, they’d lain low for a while, and all had been quiet, but it was an unnatural quiet – the kind of quiet which is so close and heavy it even silences birdsong, before August turns into a raging storm. Before dawn one morning, when it had still been dark, the flics had battered down two dozen doors all over Marseille with their axes. L’Oreille had been in bed sleeping with one of his girls when he’d heard the wood splinter.

  ‘I should have been with the other one. If I’d been with her, she’d never have squealed. She wanted to teach me a lesson. That’s why I’m here, the bitch.’

  ‘Women,’ muttered Artyom sympathetically.

  ‘If I so much as looked at another girls’ tits, she’d go fucking demented, and start throwing things around. She’s a mad cunt, that one. Know what she did once? Put a spoonful of rat poison in my food from some tin someone brought back with him from the trenches in 1918. Must have lost some of its kick, because it didn’t do much to me, just made me crap like a racehorse all night…’

  Artyom smiled as he blew smoke over his upper lip.

  ‘I don’t give a fuck anyway. What are the flics going to prove? Fucking nothing that’s what. I haven’t confessed to anything, and I’ve got the best lawyer in the business, only he’s an expensive cunt.’

  ‘I know. I spoke to him. That’s how I got permission to see you today. You doing alright?’

  ‘No worse here than it was in Viterbo.’

  L’Oreille was referring to the six months he’d spent in a Jesuit college when he was fifteen years old. ‘What brings you back down here anyway?’ he asked Artyom. ‘Arms?’

  ‘No, I’ve long since given that up. After the Bolsheviks stole my brother-in-law’s factory in Petrograd, I tried to become a free agent with old German stock from the war, but the Versailles Treaty scuppered that.’

  ‘So what have you been living on then?’

  ‘I’ve been dabbling on the Paris Stock Exchange. Some investments have paid off, others haven’t. It’s just another form of gambling. But that’s not where the big money’s to be made.’ Artyom glanced over his shoulder and whispered, ‘That’s why I’m looking for fresh opportunities in North Africa.’

  The guard moved restlessly in his seat, unhappy that he couldn’t hear.

  ‘Going it alone over there is no picnic,’ answered the small man just as quietly. ‘Doing business with them is tricky.’ He asked for a cigarette, and Artyom lit it for him. ‘Don’t do it. Too many risks, and you can’t trust them.’

  Artyom inhaled smoke deep into his lungs consideringly. ‘You’ve made me even more eager to go there now,’ he said grinning.

  ‘Fucking hell, you’re a stubborn bastard, Artyom. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.’ L’Oreille tapped the table. ‘If you’re really set on getting yourself killed, go to Place de l’Opéra first, to the Café de la Terrasse. Ask the patronne, Madame Trigano, where to find Pierre. Tell him you’ve been talking to me. He’ll give you a few tips.’

  ‘When’s your trial?’

  ‘No date yet.’

  ‘Is there anything you want me to do?’

  ‘No. Thanks for coming to see me.’

  ‘Thanks for the help.’

  ‘You’re still a mad cunt.’

  30.

  A little later, in a crisp clean shirt, he was walking down La Canebière, the street of which the Marseillais liked to boast, ‘Si Paris avit une Canebière, ce serait un petit Marseille’. When he reached the end and saw the masts of the little sailing boats in the old port before him like a leafless forest, he felt happy to be returning to an old haunt.

  He’d spent most of the 1914–1918 war working there, waiting for shipments from his brother-in-law’s armaments factory in Russia. His job was to check the cargo against the inventory once the crates had been unloaded from the hold, and then supervise their reloading onto the waiting trains at the quayside, ready to deliver the arms to the large depot in Avignon, or to the even larger depot in Clermont Ferrand.

  Another aspect of his work had been to try and lighten the burden of import duties, and Artyom had soon learnt who was who among the custom officials of the Bassin de la Joliette. Back then, he’d been familiar with all their tricks, and knew exactly who it was most profitable to bribe. The glory of Marseille was that there were so many men ready to do you a favour for a reasonable price. The dockers were a corruptible bunch, and the scum in charge of security were even worse; an honest man was rarer than hen’s teeth. Most of them were members of gangs, which, though fiercely independent, were highly persuadable when it suited them, and it usually did suit them when there was a promise of payment blowing their way.

  But they were also easily insulted, and could bear a grudge for generations. Nevertheless, where the police were concerned, all mouths were shut on pain of death. Every now and again, the flics would come sniffing around, but more for form’s sake than anything else. There was a tacit understanding that the gangs would sort out their own quarrels, and if anybody in the police thought otherwise, then a bribe was the most convenient way to make all that tedious paperwork float away as light as a feather on the air.

  A big-bellied man with a thumb missing on his left hand came to sit opposite Artyom in the Café de la Terrasse. The face which stared at him from under the blue cap was covered with pockmarks, testament to a serious illness from his childhood. Although Pierre’s face was bony, his shoulders were wide as an ox. His father had been a sailor, and his grandfather had been famous throughout Marseille for his ability to trim a sail in the face of a hurricane, but Pierre hadn’t followed in their footsteps. Instead, he’d left school at nine to be apprenticed to a metalsmith, and made his living maintaining and mending ships’ boilers while they were in dock.

  Later that evening, the two of them sat in the rosy glow of the lamp in Artyom’s hotel room.

  ‘Where do you get your hands on this stuff these days?’ asked Artyom, scooping up a nailful of powder and snorting it.

  ‘From Beirut. Much easier now than it was in 1916,’ Pierre replied. ‘Back then the government wanted to make sure nothing came into the country that might send the boys in the trenches off their heads. Poor buggers. I lost three cousins in Verdun. Good?’

  ‘Mmmm.’

  ‘But since the war ended there’s a big demand for all kinds of stuff. Morphine, Hashish. Opium, of course. Anything to dull the pain, eh? All those soldiers missing half their limbs. And all those women still missing their men. We get the odd shipment coming in through Corsica or Trieste, but it’s mainly from Beirut. Most of it is grown in Turkey.’

  Artyom stretched his legs out and asked, ‘Why does opium from Turkey have to come through Beirut? Isn’t that more complicated than it needs to be? You have to cross two borders…’

  ‘Three,’ corrected Pierre, ‘If you count crossing from Beirut to Marseille as well.’

  To smuggle the opium from Turkey to Beirut, you had to cross into Syria, then over the border to Lebanon which was quite an undertaking. In some places, families had made their livelihoods from it for generations, the wife and the children usually sharing the burden like so many mules, while the men sat around doing nothing but chew a bit of tobacco before spitting into the sand. They knew every mountain pass and path along the border like the back of their hand. That made buying and smuggling far easier for them than it would ever be for a Frenchman working on his own.

  ‘But you still haven’t answered my question. Can’t it come straight from Turkey?’

  ‘That’s not how it’s ever been done.’

  ‘Well, it’s time things changed.’

  31.

  Sebastien never got out of bed before two o’clock in the afternoon. Then, he’d have a good long soak in the round black-and-white marble bath. Alyosha was expected to be at the ready with two pink towels when his master stepped out. He’d dry himself inch by thorough inch, pausing often to gaze at himself, and once dry he would stand in the middle of the bathroom, and perform his stretching exercises, continuing to admire himself in the long mirror. Then, he would take his time to dress, selecting one of the silk shirts Alyosha held up, two at a time, for his perusal.

  Once a month, every month, two tailors from the famous La Grande Fabrique would come to measure him, gossiping and drinking cocktails (which Alyosha had to learn to mix). A few days later, the new shirts and suits would be delivered, though Sebastien would send them back if they were not exactly as he’d specified. At some point in the week, Alyosha would take delivery of beribboned boxes from Parfums d’Orsay on Boulevard des Italiens, or sometimes from Houbigant on Rue du Faubourg St-Honoré, full of little pots of pomades, pastes and creams for the face and hands, pastel-coloured tablets of scented soaps, bath salts in blue glass pots, and pot pourri. Sebastien had told him exactly how they were all to be laid out on his dressing table, in front of the mirrors where he spent hours anointing himself.

  He had very soft hands, with beautifully manicured nails, and his skin was pale, almost translucent in its whiteness, but he wasn’t a weakling. On the contrary, he was strong and sinewy, from his years in the corps de ballet at the Grand Opéra. He might still be dancing had the company’s prima ballerina not taken a violent fancy to him, at a time when she was fast approaching the age when she would have to give up performing and turn to teaching her craft to others.

  ‘You little angel, give Mummy a kiss.’ Until her desire grew from bad to worse. ‘My little man…’

  She was fiercely possessive, and wouldn’t share him with anyone, because he was hers and hers alone, night or day. He was seventeen, and she was nearly forty. She would whip herself into a jealous frenzy at the thought of another woman trying to get her dirty little paws on him. Just thinking about this possibility would send her into such a rage, she felt as though the blood pumping through the vein in her temple might explode over her nose.

  ‘He’s my sweet sugar lump, and nobody else’s,’ she’d say, stroking his cheek tenderly with the back of her hand. ‘You’re such a pretty little puppy,’ she’d murmur, biting his bottom lip tenderly between her teeth.

  When she did this in front of other people, he would die of embarrassment.

  ‘Don’t…’ he’d tell her quietly and turn his face away.

  Then she’d ask, ‘Sebi, why? Why are you so mean to Mummy?’

  His reticence only made him more desirable. As for his skin, it gave her some sort of second wind, so that she felt like a girl of eighteen again. She imagined herself shaving all the red hair on his groin and his testicles, until one night, she did just that, telling him in tones of wonder afterwards, ‘They’re like two eggs in my hand…’

  When the time came for her to leave the Grand Opéra, she persuaded Sebastien to come with her. She wanted them to live together forever. Four years trickled by, spent touring all over Europe in an open-topped motor car, though they kept a home in Paris: Budapest, Bucharest, Berlin, Stockholm, Warsaw, Copenhagen and Madrid, never staying very long in one place. But for all the driving and spending, being every minute in each other’s company did neither of them much good. The truth of it was that Sebastien soon became sick and tired of the selfish generosity which claimed his body in payment every night. What kept him with her so long was how much he loved their way of living: the dances, the operas, the plays and the parties. But she could sense that he was starting to pull away from her, like a ship gently hauling up its anchor, while she was still at the quayside. It made her beg him to love her all the more, which made Sebastien hate her all the more. Her emotions were too strong for reason. She could pounce on the least thing as an excuse for throwing a public tantrum of epic proportions. She had no compunction about picking a quarrel in front of everybody in the restaurant at the Ritz, or throwing a glassful of Sazerac in Sebastien’s face in the bar of the Théâtre-Français, or storming out of the casino in Cannes, screaming obscenities at him which would have made a whore blush.

  It was not as though he had ever loved her. That was the naked truth, and living in her company became more and more tiresome. One late afternoon, in a villa in Livorno, he woke from a nap and made himself a promise that he would, before long, find himself more agreeable pastures, come what may.

  That happened in Monte Carlo. At a ball to see in the new year at the Hôtel de Crillon, the wife of the politician Henri Dupont fell head over heels in love with him. Telling her husband that Sebastien was teaching her the foxtrot, their raging affair was soon the talk of Paris. Caught up in her passion for the boy, she naively imagined – when she bothered to give it any thought – that nobody had noticed. Meanwhile, tongues were furiously wagging in the salons of the sixth and seventh arrondissements of Paris, and, after it had reached everybody else’s ear, it eventually reached the ear of her husband. Reproaches and ructions, tears and tantrums ensued, but the greatest danger was that the scandal would gather so much momentum, it would crash into the corridors of power at the Quay d’Orsay. That was not to be borne.

  ‘That is not going to happen,’ Henri shouted furiously when he heard from the deputy-editor at Le Figaro (an old school friend) that the newspaper was offering to pay Sebastien for his story. Realising that there remained only a limited time to contain the situation, Dupont acted swiftly. A yellow envelope with a black rim (such as one would use for a letter of condolonce) was delivered to Sebastien by hand. He had been expecting some sort of approach, but when he saw the amount being offered, even he was impressed.

  After that, there was no turning-back, and teaching wealthy women the foxtrot became a way of life. It kept him very comfortably, and his apartment in the Bois de Boulogne was as luxurious and well-appointed as any in Paris. He had his standards, of course, and he wasn’t one of those gigolos – there were all too many of them in Paris and on the Riviera – who negotiated a fee in advance and would only be paid in dollars. So vulgar. He didn’t mind how he was paid. As far as he was concerned, a cheque from a bank in Boston or Berne or Liechtenstein was equally acceptable. He was also happy to accept gifts in kind – a gold cigarette case perhaps, or a watch. He still wore a beautiful pair of diamond cuff-links the President of Paraguay’s sister-in-law had given him for entertaining her so well while her husband was buying guns from a factory in Rouen.