ACT I - CHAPTER 21

RECALL FROM PARIS

Monday March 12, 2018

Tour D’Cygne Fencing Club

Paris France

“Someday I’m going to beat you,” Lenel said to Franco as they left the Fencing Club. They walked towards their usual meeting point to perform the ritual with the other initiates.

“It will be a difficult task considering the Russian teachers I had in my early days,” Gambino responded.

Lenel’s plan was to get allies within The Family and carry out “a coup d’état” that would be the purge necessary to reform it. He selected his youngest and most loyal followers and conspired with them secretly.

“Are you going to the final in Moscow?” Lenel asked.

“No. I’ll watch it on television from the house I built for myself in New Zealand. I hope it will be finished by then. And you?”

“As Boss of Paris, it will be an honor for me to replace someone who has been my mentor all these years,” Lenel added in the most cynical display of loyalty.

Franco loved Lenel, and would have liked to tell him not to go to Moscow. He had been like a son to him at first, but he deserved to die if he was going to betray him. Franco knew that Lenel did not have the codes that the hacker Peter Bolt had discovered because he had made sure that option did not exist. At that moment he remembered what had happened.

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The first thing he did was ask Lenel to hire a hitman to kill Bolt in his apartment. He should kill him three hours before Ronald’s funeral, according to the astrological chart of the appropriate time to commit the murder. But there was another condition. Lenel had to give him the name and photo of the hitman who should use a type of weapon, silencer and appropriate bullets that Franco would tell him, and for the same reasons: astrological magic. Franco promised Lenel that if he complied, he would appoint him head of The Family throughout the world, an offer to which he could not resist. Before the hitman murdered Bolt, Lenel had to be in a public place three hundred meters from Casa Milà, at a specific place and time, also for astrological reasons. He had to wait there to receive a call. Then he had to go to Bolt’s apartment and look for a yellow pendrive no matter what he saw at the crime scene. Lenel did not know what the pendrive contained. He had to give it to Franco at Ronalds’s funeral and he could not copy or read it. Lenel decided to do exactly what he asked. It was his opportunity to achieve all the power he needed in The Family to do the purge he wanted to do, and he wouldn’t betray him because he knew they would be watching him. But how could they find out if he copied the contents of the pendrive before giving it to Franco?

What Lenel never knew is that on the day of Ronald’s funeral, Franco, alone, without saying anything to anyone, went to Casa Milà to wait for the hitman that Lenel had hired. He had the photo of him and knew it was him when he arrived. His name was Piero Santini. When he saw him enter the building, he went up with him to the elevator, disguised as an electrician, dressed in a jockey and calypso overalls. He pointed a silenced pistol at and took him to Bolt’s apartment. When he opened the door Franco shot him and the hitman in the head and they both fell dead to the ground. Wearing rubber gloves, he took the hitman’s gun and put it in Bolt’s hands to mark his fingerprints.

Then he took all the pen drives and memory devices from Bolt’s computers. Before leaving, with the care of a watchmaker, he kicked the bodies and faces of the two corpses that were lying bleeding on the floor, destroyed a chair and other furniture and took some valuable objects, fabricating false evidence of a robbery frustrated with violence. He paid attention to even the smallest detail. Finally, he placed a yellow pendrive between the two lifeless bodies, in the middle of the carpet, so that Lenel could see it easily.

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Before leaving he checked the crime scene one last time, It’s a work of art! he thought, Important things you will always do it with your own hands. He had heard it from his father and he from his grandfather and so on down to his most distant ancestors, senators from Constantine’s ancient Rome.

Before leaving, with the cell phone of the hitman that Lenel had hired, he sent him a text message: “mission accomplished, now you can come”. When Lenel received the message, he headed to Casa Milà and passed an electrician coming out of the building dressed in calypso overalls and a jockey, but he did not recognize Franco. After Lenel got in and out of the elevator, he walked around looking for the apartment number and found the door ajar. Upon entering he saw the crime scene and the yellow pendrive in the middle of the room. He didn’t have time to think, so he walked very carefully so as not to step in the puddles of blood, took the pendrive and left the place, closing the door gently. He then took a tissue and wiped the fingerprints off the handle.

He needed to go to the funeral to give the pendrive to Franco. It was his passport to fulfill his divine mission. He already imagined himself as the head of The Family throughout the world.

With his calypso overalls and electrician’s jockey, as well as a tool box with a double bottom, where he had hidden the gun and everything he took, Franco walked from Casa Milà about three blocks to a cafe where he sat down and ordered a drink. After paying he went to the bathroom where he took off his overalls. He put it in his briefcase, leaving him in jeans and a red-checkered lumberjack shirt. In the bathroom he called his driver-bodyguard to wait for him on the street behind the cafe. No one noticed that he had changed his clothes when he left the cafe that was full of people.

Franco got into the limousine. He took off his jeans and lumberjack shirt and dressed in formal clothes to arrive at the cemetery just in time for Ronald’s funeral where Lenel was waiting for him.

Before arriving at the cemetery, he put his costume, the Bolt pendrives he had taken, and everything else in the limo’s safe. If someone tried to open it, Franco would receive an alarm on his cell phone and detonate a bomb with just the press of a key.

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At the end of the funeral Lenel gave him the yellow pendrive and both smiled triumphantly, but neither knew the reason for the other’s smile. Franco had set a trap for him; Lenel, had copied the pendrive.

At dawn the next day, when everyone was asleep in his house, Franco took everything out of the limousine’s safe and put it in a bag. He got into another car and drove alone to an abandoned factory. There he burned everything except Bolt’s pendrives and other memory devices that he put in the bank-like vault of his mansion.

“Who do you think is going to win the world cup?” Franco asked in an indifferent tone when his mind left its memories and returned to the place.

“It’s going to be among the same people as always,” Lenel responded.

“Brazil, Germany, Spain, Argentina, any of those,” Franco said.

“Yes, but you never know,” Lenel said and smiled, looking away, thinking that Franco didn’t know the purge he would do in The Family.

“It’s true, you never know,” Franco said, flashing another cynical smile. He felt sorry for Lenel.

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One Exceptional Mind, by Charles Kocian. Copyright 2024. All rights reserved.

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