Ranulph Fiennes - Killer Elite

Amr still felt no inner desire for vengeance. The day set by the Ashrafi passed and he had still avenged none of his sons. The elders came to him and asked if he knew of any reason why the edict of the conference should not be carried out. There being none, as far as he could see, he bowed to the inevitable. Failure to comply would mean death for his family, so, in the autumn of 1975, he said farewell to Baaqi and his remaining supporters and left Dhofar forever, taking with him his closest kin.

De Villiers immersed himself in the demimonde of Paris night life. He needed a honey-pot trap, but with a difference. Davies meanwhile watched the judge, sought out his “pattern,” meticulously logged his every move. It was early October 1976. In two or three weeks the pair would meet and put together a schedule for the judge’s death. The lady client had specifically ordered that the target’s posthumous reputation be disgraced. So de Villiers concentrated on the sordid. He ignored the obvious tourist traps of Pigalle, Montparnasse, St. Germain des Pres and the Champs-Elysees. All expensive froth and no action; or, as Davies put it, “All mouth and no trousers.”

The hostess masseuses offering gentlemen “the ultimate body massage,” the pseudo-Thai girls with their body-body bathrooms and the quick hand- or blowjobs of the parks-all these lacked the extreme denigration de Villiers sought. Zoophilia was available; indeed the Paris milieu interfered only “if the animals suffer.” The most commonplace were canine seances but there were also studios with donkeys, horses, pigs and monkeys. Most of these dens of iniquity made their profit through selling videos of the action.

De Villiers considered the possibilities of pedophilia, rampant in Paris with pedophiliac rings and films featuring two- to twelve-year-olds of both sexes, but decided against it. Not with a member of the judiciary. It lacked the ring of truth, and he was a perfectionist. In his experience most pedophiles had one thing in common: they were men whose careers put them in close contact with children. Social workers, vicars, schoolteachers, but not judges.

He looked into the closed world of sadomasochism. There were only four women in Paris who specialized in flagellation and “tortures.” Their clients, who averaged one or two visits per month, were forbidden to touch them and yet paid 1,000 francs per hour. Not the sort of scene de Villiers was seeking. Too parochial; a strange face would stand out a mile.

By the end of his first week in Paris, having made short work of the private-subscription orgy clubs and the exhibitionists of the rue de Roland-Garros, de Villiers was concentrating on the gay scene and in particular the graveyard where his old favorite, Edith Piaf, resided. In the late seventeenth century a Jesuit named Pere Lachaise was confessor to Louis XIV. The graveyard that is named after him is a dismal, rambling place with many dingy corners, gothic tombs and derelict chapels. After the war the cemetery served as a perfect spot for DIY prostitutes with no rooms of their own. Homosexuals took over in the sixties. De Villiers counted seventy-nine young men, between eighteen and twenty-five years of age, who operated in the graveyard between 1 p.m. and 6 p.m. Their customers, numbering hundreds at certain times of the week, were usually middle-aged or elderly pederasts. Uniformed inspectors of the Brigade des Parcs et Jardins patrolled between the rows of chrysanthemums but had little authority and seldom intervened. On the approach of an inspector, or one of the mainly Soviet tourists who came to see Piaf’s tomb, the young man and his client, sitting on a gravestone, would simply cover their laps with a tourist map or a copy of Le Figaro.

De Villiers decided the Pere Lachaise Cemetery was a distinct possibility but, wishing to explore every lead, he took a cab to the frenetic roundabout of the Porte Dauphine, on the edge of the city near the Bois de Boulogne. Every evening of the week, their work done, a host of Parisians descend by car on the Porte. Each driver circles until he or she makes eye contact with a fellow joy-seeker. Hand signals are exchanged and the two parties leave the concourse to seek intimacy elsewhere. This custom, de Villiers discovered, was a favorite with wife-swapping couples, and so again lacked sufficient degradation for his purposes. His dilemma was resolved by good fortune. Davies confirmed on the twelfth day of his judge-watching that on two Tuesday evenings in succession the judge had driven his Citroen ID19 to the Bois de Boulogne. Davies called de Villiers at his hotel and the method was agreed upon.

To Parisians the Bois has always meant romance, the mythical forest of the fairy temptress Melusine, a place of moonlit fauns and summer idyll.

In 1970 a handful of the entrepreneurial freelance prostitutes known as tapineuses tried their luck with motorists either in the backseat of the car or in the bushes. Harmless fun that bothers nobody, the chief of the brigade decided. Then, in 1973, the travelos came.

Veroushka was the first. In Sao Paulo, where she learned to “faire la nuit,” she met a madame who sold her a package deal for 12,000 francs including air tickets, identity papers and a three-month tourist visa for France. At first, tolerated by the established Bois whores as an oddity, Veroushka made up to 2,000 francs a night. But by 1976 a further two hundred Brazilian transvestites had followed her route to the forest and thrown out all but half a dozen of the “genuine” prostitutes. Competition was fierce.

Minister Poniatowski tried that year to oust the travelos. He failed and the police continued to turn a blind eye. Every three months each of these androgynous workers took a day-trip to Belgium to receive a passport stamp enabling him/her to apply for a further three-month visa. This was no great trouble in return for a job paying an untaxed fortune, compared with likely takings back in Rio or Bahia.

Pia was twenty-four and about as sexy a travelo as the Bois regulars could remember. She was blond, tall and sad: exactly what de Villiers was after except that her specific beat was in the wrong part of the forest. The best spots, on the roads most used by motorists, were jealously guarded by the older and richer bisexuals. Davies, given the job of changing Pia’s beat, drove out to the Bois around midnight. Most of the “girls” worked between 11 p.m. and dawn, for daylight was their enemy, revealing hair growth and highlighting other remnants of masculinity.

The travelos were heavily outnumbered, Davies discovered, by voyeurs who parked their cars, left the headlights on and mooched around the business sites staring at the weirdos and their customers. Vendors of hamburgers and beer did good business in the most popular areas. Their trade, Davies noticed, was with the girls and the voyeurs, never with the clients, many of whom slunk away when sated, their eyes averted from the light-a fact that pleased Davies. The travelos mostly displayed their breasts, and those with more feminine thighs wore miniskirts or just a G-string. In winter, Davies mused, this sort of business conducted al fresco must leave a lot to be desired. What clothes the girls did wear were gaudy in the extreme: leopardskin leotards, polka-dot T-shirts, plumes reminiscent of Rio samba queens, and glittering sequins tacked on everything from high-heeled shoes to hair bands. Davies cruised the roads of the Bois for an hour or more until he was satisfied he knew its layout and the location of all the girls.

Pia was indeed a good looker. Davies warmed to the idea of his job. Initially he had felt disgusted. As he watched the voyeurs he realized many were affluent. They had only to visit riverbanks or sandy beaches anywhere in summertime France to enjoy the sight of countless real breasts and bare bodies. Davies shrugged. It takes all types, he thought, unaware of any irony, since he saw himself and his work as perfectly mundane.