Nicole nodded, her hands clasped in front of her. She looked suddenly small, and no longer as physically confident. Yet there was a resolve about her, as if nothing was going to penetrate her armour. The soft murmur of Claude and Jean- Michel talking on the canal bank gave the boat an oddly leisurely atmosphere, yet Rocco felt anything but relaxed.
‘What happened to you?’ she asked, eyeing the patch of iodine and his bruised skin.
‘I fell in the canal.’
She nodded, accepting his businesslike approach. ‘Very well.’
They had slipped off the boat from Oran under cover of darkness, a line of figures scurrying across the narrow stretch of open ground between the quayside and the warehouses lining the dock. A crew member saw Nicole and whispered that they were now in France, and wished her well.
She swept up her son, Massi, clutching his slim shape to her, and hurried after the man in front, praying that it would not all end here, so close to freedom. She almost wept at the freshness of the sea air blowing across the dockside. She was shivering after being kept in the confined storage room below deck, where the pounding of the ship’s engines on the other side of the bulkhead had cooked the atmosphere and made the journey unbearably noisy and claustrophobic.
Freedom. It represented different things to so many people. To these men with her, it was an opportunity to start a new life, to earn money to send home, a chance to avoid the grinding poverty that embraced them in their homeland.
To her it was the opportunity to hold on to life itself, to keep her son and watch him grow; to free him from the threat of death and brutality and the cruelty which would be his lot if they stayed in Oran.
And to prevent him growing in the image of Samir Farek.
Ever since she had slipped on board the boat named the Calypsoa, a rusting, old cargo boat which stank of diesel and dirty seawater, and rattled with every surge of its engines, she had been aware of the men watching her. Uncomfortably close to them, she had felt intimidated at first, by their presence and their haunted eyes, by their expressions of desperation, of exhaustion. By their curiosity, too, about her and what she was doing here. As disturbing as it was, though, as they had chugged out of the Vieux Port, the rattle of winches and chains pounding through the boat’s hull, she had heaved a sigh of relief. This was only the first stage of her journey, but she was content to be at least this far ahead of the fate which had been her due had she stayed.
‘A woman should not travel alone like this,’ said one man, whose name she later learnt was Slimane. ‘Especially a mother.’ He was of medium height, slim but strongly built, and boasted of being a slaughterman, one who could open the throat of a full-grown bull with the same ease as he kissed a whore. As if to prove the point, he produced a wicked-looking knife which he claimed was the tool of his trade, and stared intensely at Massi, who was watching from behind his mother’s back, eyes huge and round.
‘Are you married?’ he asked later in the journey, nodding at Massi. ‘Or are you just a whore with a paid-for bastard?’
She did not respond, flinching at the harsh words and the brutal tone, and looked to the others for support. But they all looked away, some not wanting to hear that she was running from a husband, others embarrassed by the possibility that she was a woman of low repute.
Slimane kept needling her at regular intervals, pulling out his knife for no good reason and testing the blade. All the time he would watch her, until she felt his eyes were boring into her soul.
‘I have seen you before,’ he said, as the boat slowed after the second day, and wallowed in a cross-current. She could hear the sounds of a motor some distance away, but enclosed in the storage room, none of them could see out, their next destination known only by the men who were transporting them.
She said nothing to Slimane, knowing that would encourage him.
‘Yes, I’ve definitely seen you before,’ he repeated. ‘But not in any whorehouse.’
That night they were dropped off at an unnamed port, and taken through a warehouse and hurried on board a truck, secreted among a cargo of rope. It had been uncomfortable and smelly, the air filled with dust and fibres, and the driver had given them containers of fresh water and a handkerchief for Massi to tie around his mouth to stop him coughing. Coughing, he had told them, would mean discovery and a return trip across the Mediterranean.
By morning, they were in a large shed awaiting the next stage of their journey. Outside there were vineyards, said one man, and open countryside. He had been excited yet fearful, and when Slimane told him to shut up, he had sat down quickly, afraid.
That night they climbed onto another truck, this one filled with boxes and the smell of plastic. One of the men had told her in a whisper that the boxes were full of car parts.
That night, Slimane had tried to rape her.
CHAPTER SIXTY
She smelt him first. He’d been in the far corner of the truck, having secured himself some extra space away from the others. Nobody had tried to encroach on it, fearful of the knife and unable to see in the dark. He had remained apart, a brooding presence.
Then he began moving towards her.
Massi was fast asleep, exhausted by the journey and the lack of good food. But at least it prevented him from seeing what happened next. She became aware of movement and heard the man’s coarse breathing as he slid closer.
Nobody tried to stop him.
A rough hand closed around her ankle, the grip like a clamp. Then it slid upwards, forcing its way beneath her coat and dress, like a large, obscene spider. She struggled, kicking out, felt a spray of spit touch her cheek as he moved closer, his sour breath engulfing her along with the body smell of one who had not showered or bathed in days.
She fought back in silent, furious desperation, trying to push him off, to stop the hands moving over her, to stop the hot face pushing down towards hers.
In the background, one of the men protested.
Slimane turned, swore that he’d cut the throat of the boy if anyone tried to stop him. The protest ceased.
‘ Why are you doing this?’ she hissed, aware of Massi’s sleeping body nearby. Whatever was about to follow, he must not witness it, should not hear it; there could not possibly be worse things for a child to know of his mother than that she had been defiled.
‘I know who you are, whore!’ Slimane whispered, grunting as he tried to move above her. ‘You belong to Farek. Farek the gangster.’ He chuckled knowingly, the sound full of menace and meaning, and devoid of humanity. ‘And we all know what kind of women gangsters bed down with, eh? Whores and bitches.’ He pushed against her, but she managed to get one leg between them, a slim barrier but a strong one. For now. ‘So which one are you, huh? Madame Farek.’ He made the title sound at once insulting and obscene, and she knew with utter certainty that she was not going to survive this night. If Slimane didn’t kill her, Farek eventually would.
Then she felt a sharp pain in her arm, and the warm trickle of blood on her skin.
She knew instinctively what it was: Slimane’s knife. The point was sticking through the material of his jacket and had pricked her arm.
She stopped struggling, trying desperately to think. How to stop him? She had to distract him, to focus his mind on one thing and one thing only. She would have only one chance. After that… she couldn’t even contemplate what came after that.
He grunted in surprise as her body went limp and soft, then chuckled, sensing compliance. He reached down to open his clothing, grunting like a pig at a trough. As he did so, Nicole slipped a hand inside his jacket, searching the rough fabric, feeling for the weight of the knife’s handle, desperately hoping that Massi would continue sleeping.
Then another hand touched her, this time from one side, out of the darkness. She cried out in horror at the idea that another man was joining in. But this wasn’t like Slimane’s repulsive groping, wasn’t invasive and probing
