A Foreign Country. Чарльз Камминг

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      14

      Elsa Cassani had the washed-out complexion of a young woman who had spent the bulk of her twenty-seven years sitting behind computer monitors in darkened rooms. A full-figured, lively Italian with stud ear-rings and a steady smile, she had called Kell’s mobile shortly after twelve o’clock and arranged to pick up the SIM and BlackBerry from a café on the Rue de l’Hôtel des Postes.

      The handover was straightforward. As instructed, Elsa had put on a hat, found herself a table and ordered a Campari and soda. (‘Ah,’ she had said, enjoying the trick. ‘Because it’s red.’) Within a few minutes, Kell had strolled in, spotted the hat and the drink, handed over the hardware and told her that he needed the results ‘by sunset’. He had then walked off in the general direction of the Mediterranean leaving Elsa alone at the table. Nobody had batted an eyelid. No need for the discipline of a formal brush contact. No need for Moscow Rules.

      Kell had forgotten how much he disliked Nice. The city had none of the character that he associated with France: it felt like a place with no history, a city that had never suffered. The too-clean streets, the incongruous palm trees, the poseurs on the boardwalks and the girls who weren’t quite pretty: Nice was an antiseptic playground for rich foreigners who didn’t have the imagination to spend their money properly. ‘The place,’ he muttered to himself, remembering the old joke, ‘where suntans go to die.’ Kell recalled his last visit to the city, an overnight stay in 1997, tracking a Real IRA commander who had struck up a friendship with an unsavoury Chechen money launderer with a villa in Villefranche. Kell had flown down on a soggy May morning to find a ghostly and sterile city, the cloistered cafés surrounding the old port deserted, the Café de Turin serving half a dozen oysters to half a dozen customers. It was different now, a tornado of summer tourists in the city, taking up every inch of sand on the beach, every changing room in the smart boutiques on Rues Paradis and Alphonse Karr. Kell began to wish that he had simply stayed in his hotel, lived off room service and watched pay-per-view movies and BBC World. Instead, he found a brasserie two blocks back from the Med, ordered inedible steak frites from a pretty Parisian waitress who smouldered for tips, and began to work his way through the copy of Seamus Heaney’s The Spirit Level that he had packed at the last minute in London. Behind the bar, a fifty-something proprietor who appeared to have modelled his appearance on Johnny Hallyday was killing time on an iPhone, trying to catch his reflection in a nearby mirror. Kell had long ago concluded that all restaurants in the south of France were run by the same middle-aged proprietor on his thirty-fourth wife with the same paunch, the same tan and the same bombshell waitress whom he was inevitably trying to fuck. This one kept scratching an itch in the crack of his bum, like Rafael Nadal preparing to serve. When it was time to settle the bill, Kell decided to have some fun with him.

      ‘The steak was tough,’ he said in English.

      ‘Comment?’

      The proprietor was looking past his shoulder, as though it was beneath his dignity to make eye contact with a Brit. ‘I said the steak was tough.’ Kell gestured towards the kitchen. ‘The food in this place is only marginally better than the stuff they served up in Papillon.’

      ‘Quoi?’

      ‘You think it’s OK to charge tourists eighteen euros for medium-rare chewing gum?’

      ‘Il y a un problème, monsieur?’