The Take(99)

Ren lifted a hand to shield his eyes from the sun and searched the sky. He’d exchanged his linen shorts and long-sleeved shirt for a pair of dark work pants and a black T-shirt. For once, he didn’t care if his body art was on full view. In fact, he preferred it. Today he was no longer Alexei Ren, business tycoon, philanthropist, and owner of the Olympique de Marseille football club. He was prisoner 887776, an unfairly convicted political refugee seeking his long-overdue revenge.

He heard the helicopter before he spotted it. He narrowed his eyes, and there it was, flying low over the water, nose dipped, an Aérospatiale écureuil, built to carry five passengers and pilot with a top speed of two hundred knots.

What better symbol of his success than this sleek aircraft descending out of the sky like Apollo’s chariot. Twenty years had passed since he’d arrived in France, a savagely ambitious man without a kopek in his pockets, the wounds from his last prison yard fight yet to heal. For the first while, he relied on his criminal skills to earn a living, but his time in the gulag had reformed him. He was determined to seek another, less fraught path. Once a profligate drinker and spender, he reined in his baser appetites and saved his ill-gotten gains. It was his goal to become a businessman, and if not a pillar of the community, then at least a law-abiding one. He kept his eyes open for the right opportunity, and when it came along, he acted. In this case, it was an investment of one hundred thousand euros in a fledgling software company operated by the son of his bookkeeper. The company flourished. Ren took his profit, bided his time, and when another promising venture presented itself, he acted once again.

In five years, his net worth reached ten million euros. Five years after that, it was one hundred million.

In time, he found a woman to marry. He raised a family. He purchased a mansion on the coast, vacation properties in exotic destinations, and of course the Solange, helicopter included. In short, he had it all. Success, the admiration of his peers, a healthy, loving family, and a level of wealth he’d never dreamed of. And all of it—or nearly all—earned from old-fashioned, honest labor. If he’d known that a life on the right side of the law could be so profitable, he would never have picked up a gun all those years ago.

The chopper came in to land, the rotor wash forcing him to step back, the wind playing havoc with his long hair. Ren waved in greeting. The pilot was another Russian who had escaped the frosty, unwelcoming climes of Moscow for the unfettered opportunities and sunshine to be had in the South of France.

The skids touched down. The boat swayed ever so gently.

Yet there, at that very moment, standing on the deck of his one-hundred-million-euro yacht, waiting to board his very own helicopter, the sun on his face, his prospects bright, his future secure by any reasonable definition, Ren was determined to embark on a course of action that risked it all.

But why? demanded a sober, somewhat incredulous voice from his newly polished soul.

Ren’s phone buzzed in his pocket, saving him from answering. “Yes?” he said.

“The boys will be at your office in an hour,” said a man speaking his mother tongue.

“Are they ready?”

“Ready for what? To take on the entire fucking Russian army?”

“Not the entire army,” said Ren. “Just one man.”

With that, he ended the call and climbed into the helicopter. Any lingering doubts about what he should or should not do vanished as the helicopter rose into the air and its nose turned toward land.

It was all very simple, he thought, enjoying the sweep of ocean below him, the exhilarating pulse of rushing into the breach, of once more saying “What the hell?”

A man cannot escape his past.

The best he can hope for is to outrun it for a while.





Chapter 59



Simon turned the corner onto a narrow street and pulled the car to the curb. Drawing a breath, he stared at the row of three-story villas, all of them painted a curdled shade of yellow, all of them in the same miserable condition. A satellite dish was mounted on every roof. Wires ran here and there, telephone wires, electricity wires, who knew what all. Refuse littered the gutter, mostly spent cans of beer, crushed packets of cigarettes, candy wrappers. It was the laziness that had always angered him most, the communal lassitude, as if no one cared about their own neighborhood’s general state of decrepitude. Not once had he ever seen someone stoop to pick up a piece of trash, himself included.

His eyes landed on a villa halfway down the street. To look at, it was no different from the other buildings around it. All the same, he wished that the door had a fresh coat of paint and that the second-floor window was not cracked and that bedding was not hung out to dry from the floor above it.

He wasn’t sure why a sense of responsibility clung to him after so long. His mother had died years ago. He’d lost track of his stepbrothers before that. His memories of the place were uniformly bleak. Maybe people were indebted to those who’d done them harm, as well as good.

Just then, the door to the villa opened and a woman, perhaps thirty, stepped out. She was petite and bent at the waist, dressed in the fashion of the Maghreb: headscarf, billowing dress, sandals. Three children followed in short order, none older than five or six. The family walked in his direction, the woman staring openly at Simon and the fancy sports car, as out of place here as a cow on Mars.

Simon started the car and drove away, past his old home. In his mind, he was processing the documents Nikki had sent him from the police archives. He’d known all along that Coluzzi was the informant. Still, there was knowing and there was knowing. Seeing Tino Coluzzi’s name typed on the official police forms had taken him back to the day in prison when he’d spurned Il Padrone’s offer of a safe cell in favor of solitary confinement and the dark, savory opportunity to gain revenge himself.