By some miracle it wasn’t raining, so instead of taking refuge in a café Henri Mourad found an unoccupied bench in a small square of Toulouse’s pink city to wait for Marcel. The southern nights were now almost as warm as the northern days, and a group of weathered old men threw pétanque on the far side of the square, oblivious to the fading light. Henri’s view of the game was poor, but the players’ reactions and taunts were enough to tell him one side was handily beating the other, and delighting in their impending victory.
The game distracted him enough that he didn’t clock Marcel until after the Frenchman had entered the park. He tried to approach discreetly but failed miserably thanks to a hoarse, chesty cough. Henri expected him to sit on the bench, but instead Marcel walked close by, whispering, “Follow me.”
Henri fell in beside him, and they walked toward a park exit. “Have you found them?”
Marcel jerked his head around, checking nobody was within earshot. “Yes. And it won’t be long before someone else here does, too. The whole city is jumping, ready to beat them to a pulp.”
“Your forger Benoît must have been well-liked.”
Marcel shrugged. “He was a skilled forger, and he never cheated. More importantly, he was one of us. Two strangers walk into town, take advantage of our hospitality, and respond by killing one of our own. What would you do?”
Henri couldn’t answer that. He also couldn’t answer the biggest question of all; why hadn’t the Portuguese smugglers used the forged passports? Marcel had summoned him because the Toulouse underground believed the men had returned to the city, despite the obvious danger. Why? Why hadn’t they gone with the shipment to England, as must surely have been the plan?
Marcel was so preoccupied with the smugglers’ offences toward Toulouse that the question didn’t come up, and after switching cabs three times they finally took a ride out of the old town, toward an industrial district that didn’t look much newer. The cabbie was reluctant to take them too far in, and from the broken windows and rusting barbed wire Henri glimpsed from the car, he wasn’t surprised. Modern Toulouse was a thriving hub of modern industry and technology, but every city had its black spots, and this was clearly theirs.
He followed Marcel, squeezing through a gap in a wire fence, climbing over a gate where the barbed wire had been snipped away, and finally entering a long-abandoned factory building. They picked their way over fallen roof tiles, broken flooring, and discarded raw materials long rusted in the rain. Henri used the LED flash on his phone to see, while Marcel had been prepared and brought a flashlight. They made their way up to the first floor, and as they climbed the concrete stairs, Henri heard an involuntary sniffle from up ahead.
Marcel heard it too, and called out. “It’s me, Marcel. I’ve brought you food.” To Henri’s surprise, it was true. Marcel reached into his coat pocket and pulled out two sandwiches wrapped in cling film, holding them up so they could be seen in the beam of his flashlight. “I’m coming in.”
They were hiding in a former supervisor’s office, overlooking what would once have been part of the factory floor. Two men, huddled against the far wall, flinching in the sudden light, sobbing with pain and misery. Or rather, one of them was. As he drew closer, Henri saw that the crying smuggler was holding onto the other with the desperate grief of recent loss. Both had greying, sallow skin, but only one was silent and unmoving.
Henri took one of the sandwiches from Marcel, unwrapped it, and offered it to the sobbing smuggler. He recalled Old Philippe saying how ill both men had looked, that one of them seemed ready to keel over at any moment. “Your friend was already very ill when you reached Saint-Malo, wasn’t he? Is that why you didn’t travel to England?” The smuggler took the sandwich with one hand and bit into it with furious hunger, nodding in silent reply as he chewed. “And you thought you could make it back to Portugal instead, find a friend who could help you.” Another nod. “Did you know what you were carrying? Did the client tell you?”
The smuggler nodded again, but Henri said nothing, waiting for more. The man swallowed too quickly, coughed three times, swallowed again, then said, “But he told us it was sealed. That if we didn’t open the package, we were safe.”
“Why tell you at all?” Marcel asked. “Isn’t is always safer for the courier not to know what he’s carrying?”
“That’s terrorism for you,” said Henri. “People like that, they want everyone to know. Even if these guys had been caught in Saint-Malo, as soon as they said ‘radioactive’ the place would be sealed off, news cameras everywhere, lots of publicity and people saying ‘My God, they came so close, we could have all died.’ It’s a textbook play.” Marcel shrugged with disdain, and lit a cigarette. “Give him one,” said Henri. Marcel was about to protest, but sighed and handed his cigarette to the smuggler. He lit another for himself, and stepped outside the room.
“You’re doing very well,” Henri said. “Just a couple more things. First, what address was on the package? Where was it going in England? Do you have it written down?”
The smuggler pulled on the cigarette and shook his head, then coughed for ten seconds straight. Henri took out his phone and pulled up the photo of Novak and Marsh from the bar. “What about the client? How were you contacted, how were you paid? Did you see either of these men?”
Before the smuggler could answer, Marcel ran into the room. “We’ve got company,” he hissed, “I told you it wouldn’t take long for them to find him.” Henri heard distant angry shouts. They didn’t have much time before the Toulouse underground would be here to take revenge on the smugglers, assuming they weren’t both dead before the mob arrived. The smuggler was coughing incessantly now, and threw the cigarette away. Henri tried to help the man to his feet but he bent over, coughing and wheezing, too weak to stand. “Strange English-looking man,” he gasped between coughs, “found us in Sines…”
Henri propped the man up against his own knee, holding the phone screen to his face. “Why was he strange? Did he look like this? Like one of these?”
The smuggler lifted a finger toward the screen, but couldn’t hold it long enough to point at anyone in the photo. “On his mobile,” whispered the smuggler, “sounded like Chinese…” The man’s body softened, as if the tension held within his chest had dissolved into air, and he was gone.
Henri and Marcel left, taking a different route to avoid the mob. As they clambered out of a broken ground-floor window, the angry shouts of criminals denied vengeance echoed through the concrete and steel.