sent to el reformatorio. Half boarding school, half prison. For teenage boys who’d gotten into trouble with the law one too many times and whose parents couldn’t or wouldn’t buy them out. I wasn’t really bad, I just liked to get into a little trouble. Pinch a bottle of beer. Break a window. Borrow a Vespa. Finally they got sick of my nonsense and sent me to the reformatorio. When I left two years later, I took two things with me.” Rafa rolled up his sleeve, revealing a colorful tattoo. “This lovely piece of artwork and a vow never to set foot in that place again. I got a job as a runner at a bank in Madrid paying spit and a little change. I never looked back.” Rafa pointed at a sliver of blue ink extending from beneath Simon’s sleeve. “You too, I see. What’s that one?”
“Nothing.”
“Come on, let Rafa see.”
Simon rolled up his left sleeve, revealing a larger, more intricate, and colorful tattoo of a grinning skeleton with its arms around an anchor, surrounded by crashing waves.
“‘La Brise de Mer,’” said Rafa, reading the words scrolled across the anchor.
“It means ‘sea breeze.’ Corsican mafia.”
“You? Riske…the teacher’s pet? You were in the mafia?”
“Made man at eighteen. Youngest ever. Guess that’s something to be proud of.”
“Now it all makes sense,” said Rafa. “So how did you get here…from there?”
“Long story.”
“I’m from the land of Cervantes. We love long stories.”
“This is one you can’t tell anyone.”
“We’re brothers, no?”
Simon rolled down his sleeve and buttoned the cuff. “Give me a cigarette.”
“You don’t smoke.”
“I don’t. Ledoux did.”
Rafa shook loose a cigarette and offered the pack to Simon. He rolled it between his fingers but refused the lighter. Holding it was enough to trigger the memories. And so Simon told him.
How after his father’s death—Simon never said “suicide”—he was sent to live with his mother in the South of France. He was the sixth child and eighth body in a house built for four. His stepfather viewed the new arrival strictly as another mouth to feed, one that didn’t speak French and looked nothing like him. Marseille was a violent city, especially the northern districts. Simon, always a quick learner, adapted. By fourteen, he had forsaken homework for a job acting as a lookout for the small-time crime bosses who ruled the government housing blocks that sprung from the steep hillside behind his home. By sixteen, he was no longer a watcher but a participant. His specialty was boosting automobiles. No one could break into a car and have it running and on the road faster than Simon Ledoux.
At eighteen, after taking part in a series of audacious heists targeting jewelry stores, banks, and armored cars, he came to the attention of Il Padrone, a fifty-year-old Corsican who ruled organized crime in Marseille with an iron fist. Il Padrone gave Simon his own crew, and Simon delivered in spades, turning over hundreds of thousands of euros to his boss in short order. He learned how to use an AK-47. He also learned how to drink and abuse drugs on a daily basis. Life was good and getting better.
At nineteen, he planned his most daring heist yet, taking down a government payroll delivery to the French navy. Unbeknownst to him an informer had alerted the police. When it was over, four of his men were dead. Simon took three bullets before laying down his weapon. His sentence was six years. He spent the first two in solitary confinement, imprisoned in an underground cell measuring ten feet by six without a window and lit by a weak incandescent bulb twenty-four hours a day. A fellow prisoner saved him from insanity. He was an elderly man, a fallen Jesuit priest sentenced to life imprisonment, for what, he never would say. Simon called him “the monsignor.”
The priest gave Simon the education he had so assiduously avoided yet secretly yearned for. Classes were taught through a tunnel the width of his fist, which he and the monsignor had bored in the rotting concrete and plaster that divided their cells. Math, history, philosophy, art, Latin, modern languages. No fee was extracted, save Simon’s promise that one day he would leave his old life behind. The monsignor eventually told Simon he had only one thing of value to his name. A treasure held inside a safe-deposit box at a prominent bank in London. The monsignor had no key, no proof that it belonged to him. He couldn’t remember the number, just