Her blue eyes flared. ‘It’s Mademoiselle,’ she snapped, as though calling her ‘Madame’ was a far worse crime than laying your hands in a familiar way on a total stranger. So much for the neo-post-feminist political-correctness movement in France.
Ben went on apologising, but it was too late. Now the guy with her was getting involved, standing up abruptly and scraping his chair across the terrace with the backs of his legs. He had to step away from the table to avoid butting the parasol, because he was a big guy. At least three inches taller than Ben and about a foot broader across the chest. The mild irritation in the woman’s eyes was eclipsed by the fury in his. Ben couldn’t entirely blame him. It was a normal thing. A male thing. Like a rutting stag wanting to win his mate by scoring over the potential competition, this guy obviously felt he had to put on a show. Naturally, he was going to make a big thing of wanting to protect her.
Too big a thing. Right away, Ben could see the signs of a situation about to turn ugly. He wasn’t the only one. The businessman was watching over the top of his newspaper. The white-haired group had stopped talking and were throwing anxious glances at them.
‘Hey, I said I was sorry,’ Ben said, keeping his tone light and his body language unthreatening. ‘Let me buy you a drink, okay? No hard feelings.’
‘Get your fucking hands off her,’ the guy raged.
‘I did,’ Ben said. He’d backed off two long steps and now couldn’t have touched her if he’d wanted to.
‘Who the fuck do you think you are?’
‘I’m from the monastery,’ Ben said.
The big guy sneered. ‘Joker, eh?’ He came around the table, brushed past his girlfriend and moved towards Ben with his fists clenched and raised.
‘Let’s not take this too far,’ Ben said. ‘It was a mistake. I apologised.’
The woman was saying nothing. There was a gleam in her eye. Maybe she was enjoying this. Maybe the idea of being fought over was making her day. Ben couldn’t be sure, but in any case he was too busy watching her beau to take too much notice. The guy stepped closer, within punching distance. Which, with arms the length of his, was a fair stretch. ‘I’m going to knock your damn head off, asshole.’ Then the punch was on its way. Ben could have sat down, eaten his croque-monsieur, drunk his Perrier and maybe taken a little nap in the time it took coming. He stepped out of the way of the swinging fist. The guy’s momentum carried him forwards, past Ben.
‘You don’t want to do this,’ Ben said. ‘Why spoil a beautiful afternoon?’
But now it was even more too late. This wasn’t about the woman any longer. His face mottled with humiliation, the guy gathered himself up for a second punch. It was faster than the first, though not much. Ben had time to say, ‘You’re an idiot,’ before he caught the fist that was flying towards his face. He twisted it. Just a little twist. Nothing too aggressive. Certainly not vicious. But once he had the guy’s arm trapped, he wasn’t going to let go either. A lucky hit from this opponent could break his nose, smash his teeth. Ben didn’t much feel like returning to the monastery all banged up and bloody. He was fairly certain they had disciplinary rules against lay brothers who brawled in bars in their spare time. Père Antoine might just show him the door, and Ben wasn’t ready to leave.
So as Ben saw it, he really had no choice. He twisted the guy’s thick arm all the way around behind his back and used the painful leverage to dump him on his face. He hit the ground hard.
‘Stay down,’ Ben warned him. ‘It’s finished. You made your point. You’re a hero.’
But the hero wouldn’t stay down, which was a bigger mistake than the one Ben had made in touching his girlfriend’s shoulder. He swayed up to his feet and came on again. Blood was leaking from his nose and spotting all down the front of his polo shirt. Ben stepped in between the flailing arms and hit him in the solar plexus. Minimum force. It didn’t feel to Ben like much more than a tap, but the guy went sprawling backwards as if a horse had kicked him. He crashed into the table at which Ben would have been quietly enjoying his lunch now, if this hadn’t happened. The table capsized, spilling the big man back to the ground. Bloody-faced and wheezing and clutching at his stomach, this time he didn’t seem inclined to get up again. At that moment the waiter came bursting out of the bistro, along with a couple more guys. One of them pointed at Ben and yelled: ‘J’appelle les flics!’
‘No need for the police,’ Ben told them, spreading his hands. ‘I’m sorry for the trouble,’ he said to the staring auburn-haired woman, then turned and began walking away.
‘Wait!’ she called after him. ‘What’s your name?’
That just beat everything. Ben could hear the commotion as he made his retreat, but didn’t look back. Turning the corner, he broke into a jog. His nerves were jangling badly. Not because of the fight. It was as if some huge, gaping wound inside him, which he’d thought had healed, had been ripped back open again even worse than before and his whole being was gushing out of it, draining him right down to the marrow.
A hundred yards up the twisting narrow street, he settled back down to a fast walk. The jangling wasn’t wearing off, but becoming more intense. His thoughts and emotions were flying around inside him in so many directions at once that he could hardly even see where he was going. All he could see was Brooke’s face. He kept going. Crossed the street without looking, heard the urgent blast of a car horn and ignored it. He wouldn’t have cared if a bus had mown him down. Let it.
Four minutes later, he was inside another bistro. He walked straight up to the bar.
‘What’ll it be, monsieur?’ the barman asked.
‘Scotch,’ Ben said.
‘Which one?’ the barman said, motioning at a row of bottles.
‘I don’t care. You choose.’
‘Water?’
‘As it comes.’
The barman poured out a glass. It was empty almost the moment it touched the bar.
‘Leave the bottle,’ Ben said.
It was going to be a long day and an even longer night. But nothing in comparison to what would come later.
The first thing Ben saw on awakening was the stained Artexed ceiling above him. With some effort, he shifted his gaze to look down the length of his body and saw that he was lying in a bed. He closed his eyes. For a few disorientated moments, it seemed to him that he was tucked up in his bunk in the safe haven of the monastery. That the discomfiting fragments of memory playing at the edges of his mind were all just a bad dream.
Except that they weren’t. He opened his eyes and realised that he wasn’t dreaming about the sour taste in his mouth or the thudding headache of a serious whisky hangover. Wedging himself up in the bed to peer at his surroundings, it also occurred to him that his cell at the Chartreuse de la Sainte Vierge de Pelvoux wasn’t decorated with peeling posters of naked women and filled with bodybuilding equipment. A long bar resting on a flat weight bench was sagging with enough iron to make Ben’s muscles hurt just looking at it.
Nor did his cell contain a wall-mounted rack full of guns. Confusing.
Ben’s watch said it was 7.47 a.m. He climbed out of the rumpled bed and felt the full force of the hangover wash over him. He was still fully dressed. The bed was beside a small window. While his cell looked out over a sweeping eagle’s-view vista, all that could be seen from here was the bare brick wall of a neighbouring building. He peered down and saw an alleyway, empty but for a couple of wheelie bins.
He threaded his way between the bench press set-up and stacks of weights over to the gun