Scott Mariani - Star of Africa

Ben sighed. You turned your back for a year, and this was the result of it. The neighbourhood falling into the control of a violent criminal gang wasn’t going to do his chances of selling the apartment any favours, either.

There was more. Abdel told Ben that the Romanians wanted two thousand euros from him, a new monthly payment demand Dracul called ‘respect tax’. They’d given Abdel a number to phone to say he was agreeing to cough up the money. If he didn’t call by three o’clock that afternoon, they’d told him they were going to come and break one arm and one leg. That was so he could still work. Generous. He’d still have to pay, of course. Then if the following month’s payment was late, it would be the other arm and the other leg. The next time after that, they’d promised, Dracul was personally going to have his fun with Abdel’s fourteen-year-old daughter, Faridah, before handing her over to the boys to be gang-raped and beaten to a pulp. Or maybe they’d drug her up and make her the starlet in one of the hardcore movie productions they were selling on the side.

Ben was very unhappy to hear that. It made his fists tighten.

‘What am I going to do?’ Abdel said desperately. ‘I have no money to pay them. I can’t protect my own family from these people.’

‘Do nothing,’ Ben said. ‘Don’t call them. Wait for them to come to you.’

‘But I told you what they’ll do.’

‘Everything will be fine,’ Ben assured him.

After which Ben had gone back to the apartment, started stripping wallpaper, smoked some cigarettes and drunk some coffee, eaten a tin of cassoulet for lunch and bided his time until the afternoon.

Just before three, he’d left the apartment again and walked to his car, taking with him a few hardware store items he’d tossed inside his bag. He’d made the short drive and parked across the street from Abdel’s shop to wait for the Romanians to turn up.

And now here they were, bang on schedule.

As Ben stepped inside the shop, the two big guys were already standing shoulder to shoulder in front of the counter, glaring at Abdel. There wasn’t a customer in the place. The Algerian looked pale. He became even paler when Ben walked in.

At the sound of the tinkling door chime, the Romanians turned in unison to give Ben the dead-eyed warning look that said, ‘Stay out of this if you know what’s good for you.’

And for a second the pair must have thought it had done the trick, because Ben turned around and walked straight back to the door. Except he didn’t walk out of it. Instead, he popped the latch closed and flipped the sign around to say FERMÉ.

Then he turned back around to face them. He smiled. They were giving him their full attention now, arms folded and brows creased with impatience. Ben said in Arabic to Abdel, ‘These two won’t trouble you any more.’

‘Who the fuck are you?’ said the Slavic-looking one.

‘My name’s Ben,’ Ben replied, switching to French. ‘What’s yours?’

‘This is your last chance to get the fuck out of here, fuckhead.’ Cheap gangsters didn’t generally require a very wide vocabulary.

‘You should be careful how you talk to me,’ Ben said.

The Romanians exchanged glances. The darker one was grinning and shaking his head in amused disbelief at the impudence of this guy. The Slavic one didn’t seem quite so confident. Evidently the smarter of the two. ‘Yeah? Why’s that?’ he asked.

‘Because I have a gun,’ Ben said. He unslung his bag from his shoulder and took out the staple gun he’d bought that morning. A pressed-steel box with a spring-loaded squeeze mechanism. Handy for all kinds of jobs around the home. And outside it.

The Romanians stared at him. Ben aimed the stapler at the Slavic one, squeezed the handle with a clack , and the tiny steel staple went pinging through the air to bounce off his big chest.

That was all the provocation the Romanians needed. They both went for him at once.

Four seconds later, both were stretched out side by side on the floor. The dark one was still conscious, but Ben fixed that with a tap to the head with the toecap of his boot.

‘ Ya ilahi ,’ Abdel gasped, staring down at the inert bodies and wringing his hands. ‘Look what you did.’

Next, Ben took out the big roll of tape, then the scissors, followed by a thick black marker pen. He cut off lengths of tape and used them to bind the Romanians’ wrists, ankles and knees together. When they were securely trussed up and gagged with more tape over their mouths, he asked Abdel for a sheet of paper.

Abdel tore a blank page from a cash book. Ben scissored it into two halves. Using the marker pen he wrote on one half of the paper the greeting SALUT , in big blocky capital letters. On the other he wrote the Romanian gang leader’s name.

Hello, Dracul. A clear enough message, sufficiently simple for even the lowliest kind of thug to comprehend, and opening the way to the next phase of Ben’s plan. The bodies had to be correctly arranged left to right for it to read properly, but that wouldn’t be a problem.

Then Ben used the staple gun to tack each half of the paper in turn to each of the men’s foreheads. The hardened steel staples punched out with enough force to drive into wood or plaster, and had no problem biting into bone. They’d need to be prised out with a screwdriver.

Clack. Clack.

Abdel could hardly look. ‘You can’t do this,’ he said.

‘I just did,’ Ben replied.

‘They’ll come back. It’ll be worse than ever.’

‘Trust me, a bunch of miserable cowards like this will leave you alone after today.’

Ben let himself out of the shop, telling Abdel to lock up after him and go and open up the back. Two minutes later, Ben had driven round to the shop’s rear entrance, reversing up the narrow alleyway where delivery vans did their drop-offs, and found Abdel standing nervously by the back door. Ben went inside, grabbed one of the unconscious thugs by the ankles and dragged him like a sack of potatoes out to the back, then hefted him into the boot of the Alpina. Then he did the same with the other, and slammed the lid shut on them.

‘Now, give me that address and number,’ he said to Abdel.

Five minutes later, he turned down the dingy backstreet, past litter bins overflowing with garbage and crumbling walls daubed with obscene slogans and gang marks, and pulled up outside the two-storey corner building in which Abdel had said Dracul and his crooks were holed up. It certainly looked like their kind of place. The ground floor was a disused copy shop with boards for windows, plastered with flyers advertising the services of call girls. The upper windows were grimy and curtained and there was no sign of movement up there, but someone was home. A black Mercedes was parked at the kerbside below, and behind it a white Range Rover. No matter what kind of scummy ratholes gangsters seemed content to live in, they always kept their cars spick and span.

Ben parked the Alpina on the corner, killed the engine and got out, taking his bag. The only person in sight was a junkie stumbling along at the end of the street. Thudding music was coming from the crummy apartment block opposite, pulsing like a headache. A dog was barking somewhere. The wail of a baby, the angry yells of a man and woman arguing. Those weren’t the only things Ben could hear. By now, the two thugs inside the boot of his car were awake, their muffled yells and struggles plainly audible from a couple of metres away. Which was exactly what Ben had intended.

Ben walked away from the car, leaving it unlocked, and crossed the street to the apartment block’s entrance. He stepped inside just far enough to be half hidden behind the doorway, then leaned against the wall, took out his phone and dialled up the number the Romanians had given Abdel.