Conquest, p.5
Conquest, page 5
“Now wait a minute…”
“And you can return the envelope,” Martin said. “I mean, what the fuck? Honestly — it’s a couple of goddamn trucks. Nobody got killed.”
“Except for the drivers, and the guy…”
“Nobody you knew got killed,” Martin said, correcting himself. “Hell, I didn’t know them, either.” And then he muttered again, “A couple of goddamn trucks.”
“It’s a man’s livelihood,” Henri said.
“The insurance will come through.”
“So you say.”
“You could throw him some extra work.”
“So could you — and you will, goddamn it,” Henri said. “But he needs the trucks. He’s my oldest friend…”
Sir Winston interrupted with a tap on the window. When Henri and Martin look, the driver pointed to another black Citroën parked in front of them. Uncle Gérard had arrived.
It was two trains to the stadium, an entire pain in the ass, but Uncle Gérard insisted because, well, that’s the way it had always been, ever since Henri and Martin were kids, and their father and brother were still alive, and the five of them went to a handful of games every season.
The train from Saint-Lazare was crowded enough, and more crowded with every stop. But the change of trains at Nanterre was always a riot, even when the crowd was down because of the weather, or because the team was dreadful. The last part of the tradition always took place on the tiny platform at Nanterre. Gérard removed the silver flask from his breast pocket, and then Henri and Martin followed suit, and then came the toast: “To victory.” The flasks were birthday gifts when each of the boys turned 16, and God forbid you forgot to bring it.
They ran extra trains on game days, but they were all still jammed for the ride to Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Then it was the short walk to the stadium, the crowds filling both of the sidewalks and spilling into the middle of the street. They sang, and Uncle Gérard joined them. Whenever the old man died, Henri always said he would hold two visions of Gérard: singing in the middle of those crowds, and holding out his hand for an envelope in Vincent’s back room.
And while Gérard seemed to see himself as a man of the people on those game days, there were limits. The La Rue family seats were reserved and under cover, protected from the weather and from the supporters in the terraces who stood out in the rain, drank beer to excess, and pissed where they stood into newspapers rolled into funnels that they dropped at their feet.
They got to their places and the two empty seats for the departed — father and brother to Henri and Martin, brother and nephew to Gérard, Jean and Jean — remained empty. The thought of inviting Cousin Michel to fill one of them had never been considered, apparently. As for Guy, he lost interest soon after he received his birthday flask and hadn’t been to a game in at least three years. It was really about the original five of them and always would be. Gérard said he never had the heart to cancel the extra tickets, and the places where they sat were as if the five of them were still alive. Left to right, it was Martin, empty seat for Big Jean, Gérard, Henri, empty for Little Jean. None of them could remember how the arrangement started, but it was as much a part of the tradition as the train rides and the flasks.
One of the byproducts of the seating was that Gérard and Henri tended to chat more with each other, and Martin tended to feel left out. Sometimes he didn’t come back right after the half-time toilet break, running into an acquaintance or two and lingering with them at the bar rather than returning to his exile on the end of the row. It was right after the interval, with just the two of them in the row, when Gérard turned to Henri and said, “Are you ever going to tell me about it?”
He was talking about Henri’s takeover of the Morel territory in the 10th. Henri knew this, of course.
“I thought I was pretty clear,” Gérard said.
“You just weren’t seeing—”
“I see everything,” Gérard said.
“But it went fine,” Henri said. “It went fine, it’s going fine. They were a teetering shack. A loud fart would have knocked them down. It had to happen when Morel disappeared. And you don’t get that kind of opportunity—”
“Hogs,” Gérard said. “Hogs get slaughtered.”
“Nobody’s getting slaughtered.”
“Metaphorically.”
“Metaphorically or actually — nobody’s getting slaughtered,” Henri said.
“Look to your right,” Gérard said. “Just casually. Maybe 100 feet and two rows in front of us. You know where.”
Henri knew exactly where. He had looked a half-dozen times already. Still, he faked a yawn and stretched out his arms and stole a peek. In their own row, as always, were the Levines — Joseph, and his son Daniel, and another of his men.
“I’ve caught Joseph looking at us twice,” Gérard said. “So, what do you think they’re talking about?”
Joseph Levine was older than Gérard by about a decade, and his family had run the 2nd and 3rd arrondissements for as long as the La Rues had run the 18th and 9th. The 10th, along with its two train stations, was the buffer between them — except that there was no buffer anymore, not since Freddy and his machine gun had splattered salmon croquettes, among other bits of animal flesh, all over the front of the restaurant along the canal at Rue Dieu.
“They seem to have accepted it,” Henri said.
“You’re not that stupid,” Gérard said.
“They make deals — they don’t fight,” Henri said.
“Don’t kid yourself — they get their suit jackets made one size bigger, just like we do,” Gérard said. Bigger for the shoulder holsters, which Gérard still wore even though he likely hadn’t drawn his gun since the 1940s.
Right then, Menou was tripped in the box and the referee blew his whistle and pointed to the spot. Everyone stood as Anut deposited the penalty into the top right corner, and with that, Stade Saint-Germain scored the only goal of the game.
Afterward, the car with Sir Winston driving was waiting outside the stadium. The man of the people would be chauffeured home — you can take the symbolism only so far. They dropped Martin first, and then it was just the two of them in the back being taken to Montmartre. It was only then that Henri handed his uncle the first envelope containing proceeds from the 10th. Gérard might have been mad, but he also must have felt the envelope’s heft — not that it showed on his face.
The top of the butte in Montmartre was home to some of Paris’s wealthiest people, but Montmartre as a whole was a hodgepodge — seedy down near the base and then, as you began to climb, the home of artistic types, bohemians, people like that. So even the richest people at the top enjoyed the eclectic mix of the place, the energy and the unpredictability, or they wouldn’t have chosen to live there in the 18th.
But the La Rues also controlled the 9th arrondissement, which ranged from the flesh of Pigalle to, well, to the goddamn Opéra. There was real money down at the end of the 9th, the Opéra end, real money and privilege and stature — and those kinds of people, the ones who wore black capes when they went to see Verdi, were not fans of the eclectic or the unpredictable and were not going to hike all the way up to a casino or a whorehouse on the butte for their other entertainment needs. From this knowledge — or, rather, insight — was Trinity One born.
It was Henri’s great uncle, also named Henri, who came up with the idea. As Gérard said, “He saw a need, and he filled it. Sometimes life and business are just that simple.”
There was a big risk involved, though — a financial risk. Because when the whole thing came together in 1910, the La Rues were not nearly as well established as they were later, and the cost of purchasing two floors of the building at 1 Place de la Trinité was an enormous gamble. Every cent of the family’s financial reserves went into the purchase and into the renovations. But within months, they all knew it would be a success — the casino on the second floor, the whorehouse on the third floor, one-stop shopping with plenty of room to hang up the black capes.
When the Nazis came in 1940, the decision was made — by Gérard and Jean, given that they were the oldest by then — to cater to German officers even as both of them worked in the Resistance during their down time. Business is business, et cetera. When the city’s brothels were closed by decree after the war, the La Rues noticed only a blip in that business — doubling the police payoffs saw to that. When the name of Place de la Trinité was changed to Place d’Estienne-d’Orves to honor a Resistance hero after the war, the family all still called it Trinity One. And through all the decades, and all the millions of francs they had raked in, the La Rues still argued about which was the greater irony — that the windows of the casino and the whorehouse looked out at the magnificence of Trinity Church, or that the tenant below them on the ground floor of the building at 1 Place d’Estienne-d’Orves was a branch of BNCI bank. Or, as old uncle Henri used to say, “When I am leaving the casino, I drop to my knees and look out at Trinity Church and ask forgiveness every night for being an even bigger thief than the men who work on the first floor.”
Decades later, Henri liked to stop in — not every night, but maybe twice a month. These were cash cows for the family, and they were very predictable besides. The money from the casino fluctuated downward only twice a year, during the August vacations and around the holidays in December. As for the whorehouse, the only dip was in August, proving perhaps that gambling was a vice that could be forgone around Christmas — but sex, not so much.
On that Saturday night, Henri made a five-minute visit to the whorehouse first. It was about 9 p.m., and Timmy was putting on his coat to leave when Henri was arriving.
“All good,” he said, when he saw Henri.
“Quiet?” Henri said.
“No, normal Saturday night,” Timmy said. Then he patted his breast pocket and said, “The early take might even be a bit heavy.”
They stood and chatted for a minute or two more. At one point, they both turned and looked down the hallway as one of the girls, in a lime green negligée, took a stroll toward the barroom. Marcella was her name, and her red hair was her trademark. She was the newest girl in the house.
“And it’s real?” Henri said.
“Drapes and carpet, absolutely,” Timmy said. “She even paints her toenails red.”
“And is she—”
“A goddamned tiger,” Timmy said. “You should see the waiting list. It’s actually starting to piss off some of the other girls.”
“That’s fixable enough,” Henri said.
Timmy nodded. “One thing about Paris — there’s no shortage of ass,” he said.
The casino was a different operation, run by Passy. He always wore a tuxedo on the casino floor, and he always stayed until the last gambler left around midnight. Henri gave his men the latitude to have their own management styles — and while Timmy spent more time worried about the carpet and the drapes, and was willing to leave early and allow his men to take custody of the second envelope overnight, Passy always stayed to the end and did his books and pocketed the full night’s take when he left.
There were about 15 gamblers on the floor when Henri arrived. He knew almost all of them by sight and by name, seeing as how you had to be a regular, or vouched for by a regular, in order to gain entrance. Throwing dice at Trinity One, or sitting at a card table, was not a young man’s pastime. The stakes were prohibitive, for one, but there was just something about the longevity of the regulars that was somewhere between impressive and uncanny. There were two card games going on that Saturday night, and the youngest player at one of the tables was probably 65. The oldest was probably 80. Henri offered them all a hello by name, and then walked away to find Passy, wondering for the hundredth time if they should bring in researchers from the national institute to try to figure out the longevity statistics of their customers.
Passy saw Henri and walked over and, reading his mind said, “It would be the goddamndest scientific paper of all time. And I would be all for it, as long as they quoted me as saying, ‘The secret is in the La Rue water, especially when it’s mixed with the La Rue Scotch.’”
The two of them walked over to the craps table. There were a half-dozen men arrayed around the perimeter and, given that you had to stand, it tended be a younger game. By Henri’s estimation, two of the players were in their forties.
The man with the dice was Julian Broussard — mid-fifties, lot of dough, a twice-a-week kind of player for as long as Henri could remember. Won some, lost some, good streaks, bad streaks, certainly down over his gambling lifetime but not a ton. When Henri asked him about it once, Broussard shrugged and said, “Cheaper than a villa on the Riviera.”
Passy called people like him “B&B,” which had nothing to do with Broussard or bed-and-breakfasts. B&B was his shorthand for bread-and-butter, which is what the gamblers like Julian Broussard meant to Trinity One and the La Rues. They had some fun and provided the family with a steady income in return, one that never varied. And so, the family stocked the wine Broussard favored, and got the charcuterie plate he liked from Perreault’s, and made sure he had a chauffeured ride home if he wasn’t stopping for some additional entertainment on the third floor.
Henri wasn’t paying attention, but Broussard threw a four, and the six men around the table erupted in cheers, and Broussard punched the air with his fist.
“Good for him,” Passy said. “It’s been a dry couple of weeks for him.”
Then he turned, and snapped his finger to get the attention of one of the waiters, and then motioned toward Broussard. Within seconds, a bottle and a fresh glass materialized, and Broussard took a sip and punched the air again.
The night was cooler than Michel had expected, and he was shivering as he kneeled amid the shrubbery that framed the car park of the Renault assembly plant in Boulogne-Billancourt. Between the nerves and the cold, he’d had to piss twice among the bushes. It was easy enough to accomplish from his knees, the only worry being a stray bit of poison ivy that he had noticed before the moon had hidden behind a cloud. He thought he was far enough way, but his mind would sometimes play tricks on him in situations like that, nervous situations, shivering, waiting. And then as the dawn came, he saw the poison ivy again and it was closer than he remembered. And then all he could think about was scratching his crotch.
There were two cars left in the lot. It was the executive lot — the real workers parked on the other side of the massive building. Michel was waiting for the man who drove the blue Renault Caravelle, not the one who drove the black Renault Caravelle. The blue Renault Caravelle belonged to Mario Laperrière, the manager of the third shift. The black Renault Caravelle belonged to René Primeau, the assistant manager. Primeau was the recipient of a weekly envelope, Michel’s eyes and ears inside. Laperrière was the concern.
As it got to be about 7:30, Michel caught himself doing the same routine, over and over. Stare at the door of the plant, pat his breast pocket to feel the revolver, scratch his dick. Stare, pat, scratch. Stare, pat, scratch.
The Renault assembly plant had been good to Michel La Rue. There were lot of ways to smuggle heroin into the United States, but inside of the Renaults had proven to be the best. They varied the locations — wheel wells, spare tires, behind the car’s radio, others — and raked in the cash. The maintenance man who brought in the heroin with the custodial supplies had to be paid, and the workers on the line had to be paid, and Primeau had to be paid because he was in charge of paying the rest of them, and making sure the whole thing ran properly, and most of all, seeing to it that his boss never found out.
Except that Primeau made an emergency phone call to Michel the previous morning, telling him that Laperrière was more than suspicious. He said one of the men on the line, about to be fired for drinking on company time, tried to bargain for his job with the story of heroin smuggling beneath the rear bumpers of the latest shipment of Renaults to New York.
“I think I convinced him it was bullshit,” is what Primeau told him. “But I’m not positive.”
At which point, they made a deal. If Primeau sensed that Laperrière was about to act on his suspicions, he was to come out to the parking lot and tell Michel, who would be hiding in the bushes. But that never happened. It was 7:45, and the shift was over in 15 minutes, and maybe Primeau was right. Maybe he did convince Laperrière that it was bullshit. Of course, that wasn’t a chance Michel could take.
At 7:50, the door opened and Primeau looked into the morning sky. But he didn’t walk over to the bushes. Instead, he just got into his black Renault Caravelle and drove off in a roar.
Five minutes later, the door opened again. It was Laperrière. The day bosses would not arrive for another half-hour, at least. It was just the one man and the one car. Michel stood and waited until Laperrière turned to open his car door and then emerged from the bushes. Because his back was turned, Laperrière did not know where the shouting man had come from.
“Sir, sir,” Michel shouted, smoothing his coat and hurrying toward the blue Renault Caravelle.
Laperrière turned. Michel got closer.
“Sir,” Michel said. “You’ll have to excuse me. But I have an 8:30 meeting with Jean Richler.”
That was the name of the accountant.
“So?” Laperrière said.
“I know I’m early — is there a place to wait, maybe get a cup of coffee?”
“Employee canteen on the other side,” Laperrière said, not even looking at Michel as he waved vaguely to his right. Prick.
It was when he turned to reach for the handle of the door of the blue Renault Caravelle that Michel shot him in the back of the head — once, then twice. Prick. Then Michel reached into his hip pocket and took out the envelope that contained the message written in a hurried scrawl, all capital letters and in a shaky hand.
It was only five words:
STAY AWAY FROM MY WIFE!
