Scott Mariani - House of War

‘Not any more, it isn’t. When your downstairs neighbours see the blood coming through the ceiling and call the cops, it’s going to get a little crowded around here. You can’t come back any time soon. So hurry it up.’

Pierrot didn’t look too thrilled about abandoning his rathole apartment, but Thierry was looking more pleased by the second. ‘Oh, Ben?’

‘Yes?’

‘Thanks for, uh, you know, saving us.’

‘I needed the exercise. Now let’s go.’

The fat guard outside in the corridor was showing signs of recovery, so Ben knocked him out properly and dragged his corpulent bulk inside the apartment by the ankles. Then they pulled the door shut against the shattered frame and hurried downstairs, out of the building, past the Corsican boys’ Audi and up the street to where the Alpina was parked. Ben tossed Pierrot’s case in the boot, and they took off.

Thirty minutes later they were back at the safehouse. Pierrot was still sulking and hadn’t spoken another word. Ben ignored him, brewed up more coffee, then sat Thierry down at the table in the living room and told him what he needed.

‘Whose is it?’ Thierry asked, frowning at Romy’s phone.

‘You don’t need to know,’ Ben said. ‘You just need to unlock that video file. Think you can do that for me?’

Thierry spent a few moments fiddling with the phone, deep in concentration. ‘Yeah, I reckon I can.’

‘How long?’

‘Twenty minutes, give or take.’

‘You’re still my guy,’ Ben said.

Thierry Chevrolet might have seen better times and lost his sparkle, but the kinds of skills he possessed didn’t fade with age. Ben left him alone to work, and went over to smoke at the window while Thierry hunched over the smartphone at the table. Pierrot was still lurking, silent and morose, in the background. Ben would gladly have sent him out on some errand just to get rid of him, if he could have trusted the idiot wouldn’t return with half the Corsica mafia on his heels.

Eighteen minutes and three more cups of coffee later, Thierry leaned back in his chair, looked over at Ben with a sly grin and whispered, ‘We’re in.’

‘Don’t get too excited, chief,’ Thierry said as Ben went over to see. ‘It isn’t exactly what you’d call cinema quality.’

Pierrot was suddenly all interested. ‘What is it? Porno?’

Ben gave him a look that made him stay in place and keep his mouth shut. Turning back to Thierry he asked, ‘Did you see any of it?’

‘You’re the client. It’s none of my business what’s on there. I only looked at the first few seconds. Long enough to see what it isn’t.’ Thierry handed over the phone. Ben took it and sat at the table to look.

The video was less than a minute long. That made each second of its duration seem all the more precious, assuming the clip was of any value at all. After the first five seconds, Ben’s heart was beginning to sink, because he could hardly make anything out. Everything was dark and jerky, just a confusion of shapes and shadows. All that was clearly visible was the purple time and date stamp in the bottom left corner of the screen, which just confirmed the date on the file label, from three days ago.

Seven seconds in, something appeared on the right-hand edge of the frame, and moved inwards to fill a third of the screen. It was the vertical edge of what appeared to be a concrete wall, pitted and craggy. The camera’s focus sharpened on that, making the background even more blurry and indistinct. All Ben could glean from what he was seeing was that the person doing the filming – presumably Romy herself, though he had no way to be certain – was shooting the video clip in a furtive, clandestine way from behind the wall, not wanting to be seen. She, if it was her, seemed to be trying to angle the camera past its edge, around the corner, to film something happening further away. But the lighting was just too dark to see what.

Ben said, ‘This is terrible.’

Thierry shrugged. ‘You get what you get, man.’

As bad as the visual quality was, the audio was even worse. All Ben could hear through the phone’s tinny speaker was a lot of white noise. The phone mic was picking up all kinds of background sounds. He was sure he could hear Romy’s breathing, which was restrained, like someone trying to remain undetected, but fast and urgent, like someone very afraid of getting caught. He thought back to the one and only time he’d seen her alive. She’d been frightened then, too. Clearly terrified of whoever she thought was following her.

Had Romy witnessed something, Ben wondered. What were you doing? What did you see?

Somewhere in the middle of the white noise, barely audible, was the sound of muffled voices. Two of them, Ben thought. Both men, judging from the low-range tones. He strained his ears to catch what was being said, but it was impossible to make out.

‘Is there anything you can do to make the sound clearer?’ he asked Thierry.

‘Hey, I’m a genius, not a bloody magician. You might be able to clean it up a little, but not without access to some decent audio editing software. Even then, no guarantees. You can’t bring out what isn’t there to start with.’

Ben said nothing, and went on watching what he couldn’t see and listening to what he couldn’t hear. Then, eighteen seconds in, Romy must have shifted position slightly because the vertical edge of the wall suddenly slid out of shot towards the right. The camera’s autofocus was suddenly able to latch onto more of the background and suck more light from the murky shadows. The audio was still bad, but now Ben could make out more visual detail.

The scene had taken place inside some kind of warehouse or industrial building, or it could have been a cellar: a large, dimly-lit space with concrete pillars holding up the roof. Ben realised it was another of the same pillars, not a wall, that Romy was hiding behind to film the clip on her phone. She was doing her best to keep the camera steady, but the picture kept jerking and wandering and made it hard to see. Ben started freeze-framing the clip to get a better look.

At the far end of the warehouse, or cellar, rows of strange whitish objects were lined up against a wall. Some seemed to be covered with shrouds or tarpaulins, others were more clearly visible. Ben realised that they were statues. Old ones, he guessed by the look of them. Some were human figures, others of animals and mythical beasts. Some smaller in size, others so tall and large that they loomed up towards the ceiling of the warehouse. Ben let the playback roll for a few more seconds, then paused it again to catch a clear view of a massive stone creature that appeared to have the head and face of a man, the body of an elephant. Or maybe a bull. Either way it was an enormous piece of sculpture that stood nearly as high as the rafter beams, several metres tall.

It looked oddly familiar to him. Where had he seen something like it before? He thought back, then flashed on a memory of the one time he’d ever visited the Louvre museum, right here in Paris, years ago, and seen similar exhibits on display. Those had dated back several millennia, he remembered. Brought to France within the last couple of centuries, from some ancient part of what was now the Middle East.