One Step to Danger Read online

  I mused about the set up, and I looked out over the sea as we drove along the coast.

  The road from Cannes to St Tropez skirts the sea almost all the way. It passes through one resort after another. On a bleak day the whole area looks very similar to an out of season English seaside town. The warts of the seaside are hidden in the sunshine. A grey sky and rain make them more pronounced than they really are. The sea fronts become uglier than the different towns inland.

  They are stripped of their ornaments, the tables and chairs, the bright tablecloths, the gaudy shops full of swimwear and other seaside baubles. Their ambient population deserts them. Men dressed in T-shirt and shorts, sometimes suitable but often laughable. Their stomachs hiding their knees, their breasts wobbling like frightened jellies. The women dressed in sarongs and skimpy bikinis. Sometimes they were breathtaking, often attracting a second glance. And then sometimes they were caricatures of corpulence with their bulging thighs, bouncing flesh and mammoth breasts, hoping to hide behind strips of cloth more suited to something more seductive.

  In the winter, the sleek are lost in their layers of clothing. The absurd is hidden behind their layers of cloth. People blend into a covert world and only become attractive or ugly again as they unpack themselves from the anonymity of their own wrapping paper.

  Today, though, the day was not like that. The weather was cool but clear. The streets were littered with locals enjoying the freshness of the breeze from the sea. It gently played with girls’ skirts. I noticed Charles glancing hungrily from time to time at a tanned thigh winking at us mischievously.

  “Keep your eyes on the road,” I laughed. “That’s jail bait of about fourteen. I think you better give them a chance to put away their school books first.”

  “It’s all right. I am hardly likely to get attracted to something that young. Mind you, if she has an older sister that would be rather agreeable. I think I’ll wander over to St Tropez and look in at a couple of the clubs tonight. I know that it’s Sunday but they should be quite busy. And I need to relax.”

  “Do as you wish but remember that you have to keep your cover. Otherwise there will be no girls. All you’ll get is a cell for a few years.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said, “I can handle that. I am looking for a fun night, not a relationship. At least not until we have done the laundry – cash wise.”

  I rather liked that turn of phrase and laughed appreciatively.

  “OK smart arse. Let’s get moving. We are only at Agay and I don’t want to get caught up in the evening traffic. Anyway we plan to go up into the mountains this evening for dinner. Don’t wake us up when you come home. And if you do bring a girl, drop a note so that we don’t get a shock. The last time we were all together, I walked naked to the kitchen and did not like the idea of some blond telling me that she could see the family resemblance.”

  “She was nice kid,” said Charles. “But that was a couple of years ago. I wonder if I still have her number? We had a great time that night. I was surprised you knew nothing about it. She was really noisy.”

  I knew a lot of that was bravado. Something had not been right for months. Charles had always been sociable. Girlfriend followed girlfriend. Some would last a bit longer. He never had been in love. His aim was always to enjoy himself. Yet since the summer he had been quieter. He went out but without the joy of before. He talked of women as if remembering things in the past rather than looking to the future. I hoped we would find out what it was that was bothering him.

  We had asked but he had always laughed and denied anything had happened. We knew that was not the case. We knew one day the sadness would go away. Perhaps one day he would tell us what it was. Maybe he had been in love. Maybe it hadn’t worked out. I wondered if we would ever know.

  That night, Anne-Marie and I went up into the mountains at Gassin, where there is a group of very French restaurants. In the tourist season they maintain their veneer of French originality but often regress in the turmoil to the charm of a fast food joint staffed by Parisian street café waiters. In the off season, it is different. The patron will have time to talk. They will have spent time on the menu. They made their money in the season and now they can relish in their art.

  Our meal was delicious. We looked across the forest of pines and vineyards, dotted with the occasional house, over to the coastline of the St Tropez peninsula. The sea was calm in the distance, the clouds low and soft, and the stars smiling conspiratorially with only the quarter moon looking grim. I lifted my glass of house red from the region, “Let’s drink to a new beginning. We are going to have fun again; real fun.”

  Anne-Marie sighed. “Sometimes I thought we shouldn’t do it,” she said, “but you were right. We needed to get away. We were getting bored. It will be great to start up again and have fun. But if it doesn’t work what do we do?”

  “Don’t worry, it will work. We will use the funds as seed money. I’ll find a way out. I’ll do something like ending up with a big stake in a bank and that will give us access to more funds. Perhaps one day we’ll even buy my old firm. Who knows? Even the best run banks can get it wrong and then their shares fall and predators like us, without scruples about the past, can turn them around.”

  My plan was simple. It was a vague plan. I did not want to constrain my actions by making too detailed plans. I knew what we would do in general. I also knew that the plans could change if we were to really make money. Otherwise we would not take advantage of the unexpected.

  We were going to go for bust on the financial markets. We would give speculation a new meaning. We would play for broke on up to five hundred million dollars of our stolen capital. If it worked we would then move to greenmail. Greenmail is basically financial blackmail. You force companies to do things they would never do by their own free will. But they have to do as you dictate as you have taken a major stake in them. And, if that worked, we would then buy respectability. It all would work because we were not afraid of losing. After all, even if we lost we had several millions in the kitty as a reserve for the rainy days!

  I saw it as three steps. If the first step – speculation – failed, we reverted to a reserve strategy. That was quite simply living a quiet, but wealthy life, on the St Tropez peninsula at Croix Valmer. If the second step – greenmail – failed we were just super rich and as for the third stage, it could not fail if we got past step two!

  We looked at the other guests in the restaurant. There were shopkeepers. They were celebrating a good season. An elderly man was leering at his companion and getting excited whenever she called him papa in a very un–daughterly way. There was an older woman and perhaps her daughter or niece, both of whom seemed somewhat out of place. I looked at them carefully. It was late for tourists and yet they were not local. They had still the pale skins of the city. They seemed nervous about their surroundings. With that second sense that comes from being a fugitive, I knew that they too were running away. From what I may never know.

  I smiled over at my wife, “You know, Anne-Marie, Charles will be sorry that he did not join us. He would have tried to get to know the girl. She is definitely his type.”

  Don’t be silly,” she said. I was surprised by the unusually tart response. “Let Charles do his own hunting. I sometimes wish it would be like the old days when he would appear in the morning with some girl. I used to get annoyed or embarrassed if I knew the parents. Now I think I would be pleased.”

  She looked at me again, raising her eyebrows and flashing her eyes. “And don’t use it as an excuse to eye up every girl you see,” she joked, “you are acting like a male chauvinist pig.”

  We chatted casually as we finished our food, and then decided it was time to move. “Tomorrow evening we head off for Brazil via Madrid,” I reminded her. “So let’s get some sleep now. Just think, soon the dentist gives you perfect teeth and the surgeon reduces my rather prominent chin. In the meantime, let’s make love for one of the last times in our old shapes. If the design is as you have drawn
up, it could be even more fun in the new ones.”

  We were not going in for major changes. It is amazing how small changes can alter one. And that is all the more the case if you drop out of circulation for a bit. Our plan was actually quite modest and quite simple.

  Anne-Marie would have her teeth capped and a couple of her older crowns would be replaced. An expert who would make it all appear as if she had never had dental work at all would do the dentistry. Even her dentist in London would find it difficult to reconcile the old with the new.

  I would have my chin remodelled. That would both reduce it and reshape it.

  We would then go to the US and reshape our bodies. That needed two things. First of all there would be a series of medical routines. I disliked the sound of them but had been persuaded that they were necessary. Then there was a plan for some liposuction. All that would though be accompanied by a three month concentrated stint of physical exercise and controlled diet. This would tone up our bodies to perfection.

  I was keen to do that for health reasons alone. From my perspective, getting rid of the flab would streamline my appearance. Gone would be the symbols of a lifetime of office routine and business lunches. This part of the process would have less impact on Anne-Marie, but the driver for her was the thought of getting super fit.

  The final part of the process was to take place in Italy. We were going to have our hairstyles reshaped. My hair would be toned and become a pale, distinguished grey. At the moment it was a light brown, speckled with grey around the ears. I would also have some treatment to thicken out the balding patch that had started to appear a couple of years ago.

  Anne-Marie was going to stick to remodelling her style. She also planned an intensive henna treatment to bring out the true, lustrous colour.

  Both of us would stop wearing glasses. I wore them all the time although Anne-Marie only used them for driving and reading. We would be fitted with contact lenses. Charles had already done that from the time that he had left England. He had, though, been wearing spectacles with plain glass during that period to further his disguise during the Cayman scam. He was not changing much else. He was going to focus on dental treatment and exercise. He was quite slight and wanted to put on another stone. Not through over-indulging but rather through determined bodybuilding.

  We actually were all quite pleased with the plans. They should make us all look as well as feel better. And they would make it more difficult for people; especially those who did not know us well, to relate us to the past. For Anne-Marie and my details could be with the police forces of the world for some years to come. But those would be the details of our former selves.

  Charles had also insisted that we restyled our wardrobes. We had agreed and would be using wonderfully named “style consultants” for this. Anne-Marie was overjoyed with the idea of a quarter of a million-dollar budget to replace all her clothes. We would also change our jewellery. That could identify us. We had put that into the bank and left it behind. We had done the same with our old clothes. Together, this helped sow doubt in people’s minds as to our role. And we never knew how that could play for us.

  I had built up the bank accounts in my new identity over a period of a year. We used a series of companies and our new names. Currently the accounts also held the eight hundred millions we had moved electronically from the Cayman Islands. We had carefully spread it over several banks and ensured it arrived to each of them at a million or so at a time. We had explained that that was seed money for our fund management company from wealthy backers. I had also made it clear to them that further substantial funds had already been committed. Banks are always worried about large unplanned inflows. Advising them in advance makes it easy to get over those fears. And I had made certain that the money came to them directly from well regulated banks in the right countries to avoid them asking too many questions about their origins.

  As we left the restaurant, I noticed the older woman and the girl were walking ahead of us. They were already standing by their car and were having an animated discussion. They still looked nervous. They glanced at us, then looked away as if fearful that we would approach them or worse. They stopped talking and the older woman went to open the door.

  I opened our car and we climbed in. The older woman was talking to the girl again. We heard her say in a loud and irritated voice, “Get in. We are safe. Nobody is going to hurt me while you are with me.”

  I shrugged my shoulders. Sounded as if there had been a family quarrel I thought. As I pulled out of the car park, I saw that the old lady was just getting into the car. And then suddenly, with a screech of tyres, a large black sedan pulled across my path.

  “What the hell is he doing?” I gasped as I skidded to avoid him. The next moment the noise of gunfire cut through the night. Bullets ricocheted off parked cars and hit us.

  “Duck,” I shouted to Anne-Marie. “Duck, they’ve found us and sent an assassination squad. I don’t believe it. It can’t be true. How did they know where we were? Why kill us?”

  The gunfire stopped as suddenly as it had begun and we heard sobs and screams from outside the car. There was a further screech of tyres and shouts of concern in the distance.

  Shaken and white faced, we sat up in our seats. The car was against a lamppost. The front wing staved in but otherwise sound. The car belonging to the older woman and her daughter or niece was peppered with holes. The girl, her clothes spattered with blood, was crying over the motionless body of the older woman.

  “They killed her. They killed her,” she sobbed to nobody in particular. “And now they will come after me.”

  “We better get moving,” I said “we can’t afford to be caught up in this. Move.”

  “No,” said Anne-Marie. “People will have seen us and the car. If we move we will be reported to the police. If they haven’t got the number, they will describe the car and us. Better they have our names and not our pictures.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “Well done. I wasn’t thinking straight. Let’s help the girl. She’s hysterical.”

  We ran over to the girl who was sobbing violently. She was sprawled against the car. Her face was averted from the staring eyes of the dead woman. We reached her ahead of the crowd that was now running from the restaurant. We drew her away from the victim, wrapped her in my jacket and Anne-Marie tried to soothe her. I kept the others away, reminding them that the police would come soon and would want to ensure that no clues were disturbed.

  Anne-Marie was talking with the girl. She looked concerned and called me across. “I don’t know what to believe. She has just spun me the most amazing story.”

  She went on. “Her name is Jacqueline, they call her Jacqui. Her mother is French and her father is American. They are separated. She hasn’t seen her mother in years. She lives with her father. She says it’s the Mafia.

  “The older woman has a place here. She is a distant relative. The old woman told the girl in the restaurant that she had been to the police about a murder committed by one of the Mafia families. The girl did not want to stay when she heard that. She was scared. She does not trust the police to keep a secret. And now she knows she was right for the men must have been hired killers. Somehow, the girl knows them. And they told the girl she would be next if she helped the police.”

  I turned to the girl. “Why did your aunt or whoever she was get no police protection?”

  The girl was so distraught that she started talking fast. I think she realised she needed help and decided instantly to enlist our sympathy. The only way she knew was by telling us why she was now so afraid. She looked me over and then replied to the question.

  “The police told her that they would not reveal their source and that she was safe. She had come here on holiday, there was nothing secret. I was passing through and stopped over for a couple of nights. There was no reason that the evidence she gave the police should be traced back to her unless someone in the police gave away her name.”

  She continued her stor
y about her aunt. “She told me that she had promised them she could back up her accusations. She says she has a video of a brutal killing that showed the killers. The video had been put together by one of the Mafia dons to show others as an example of what happened if they breached the code. The police must have leaked her name. Or perhaps the Mafia has an insider in the police. They have quite a few. Somehow, the family got to know. She was sure they would not learn but that was stupid. I knew she was wrong. Once they learn that someone has grassed, then there’s a contract out, and they execute it quickly and ruthlessly. The quicker the grass is dead the less danger they will be. I know the laws of that jungle even if I am not part of it. I am a spectator really. Father got rich on crime but he wants the next generation to be legitimate.”

  I noted that she knew more about the Mafia than I would have expected. My senses told me not to get involved. I suspected that she and her family were very central to the Mafia. I sensed trouble. This was more than a run of the mill criminal family.

  She then seemed to calm down from her initial shock. All the pallor left. Colour returned to her face. The eyes were soft. The face was determined. It was a face that attracted, then fascinated and finally entranced one by its character and beauty. My first impression had been correct. This girl would attract most men.

  I quickly told her, “Tell the police you saw no faces. Say you knew nobody. Tell them you don’t know why they attacked you.”

  Anne-Marie said, “I will say my window was open and that I think one shouted to the other ‘we got the wrong one’ in French or similar words. Don’t worry, we’ll help you.”

  “Why do you say that?” I gasped. “We have to leave tomorrow. We don’t have a choice.”

  “We must help her. She’s all on her own. We can’t walk away. We would not have done so before yesterday. We can sort it out.”

  I shrugged in despair. I hated complications. But there was no choice. The sirens were finally whooping in the distance as the police arrived alongside an ambulance.