The White Pearl
Cara Capello stood in the middle of the empty industrial kitchen and gazed levelly at the five men arrayed in a semicircle in front of her. They were all cut from the same cloth; dark, tailored suits, expensive shoes, hair neatly combed and sunglasses that hid their eyes.
“You realise, gentlemen,” she said in perfect French, “that there are only two types of people that are allowed to wear sunglasses inside without looking like complete imbeciles. The first are rockstars who’re nursing hangovers they’ve spent the past decade laboriously crafting and whose brains natural light would dissolve like flesh exposed to battery acid, and the other type tap about with white sticks. You are, I’m afraid to say, neither.”
Not one of the five men said a word, though one did grin slightly.
Cara looked bored. She was bored. Bored of this melodrama. If only she could tell these five excrescences that she met scarier men than them at her local pub. She looked uninterestedly around the room.
She was in the back of one of Paris’ most famed bakeries, La Perle Blanche, where all the magic took place. Where macarons and croissants were crafted, baguettes, brioche and fougasse baked, and éclairs, Paris-Brests and mille-feuille made. Large mixers for dough, ovens and racks of trays lined the walls. Pots and pans and dishes were placed sporadically on the long steel counters, gleaming stainless steel bowls and kitchen utensils lay about the place. On one bench, in the middle of the room, stood an ornate white cake – perhaps made for a wedding, a birthday, or possibly a funeral – and Cara wondered what flavour it was, how long it’d taken someone to make the huge thing.
Her reverie was broken when one of the silent, suited figures spoke.
“Miss Diana,” one of the men said – using the fake identity that Cara had adopted for this particular mission. “I am Monsieur Cinq.”
“Oh, very imaginative, darling,” Cara said. “She pointed to the four other men still standing impassively around her. “And these would be Monsieurs Un, Deux, Trios and Quatre?”
“Precisely.”
“Those aren’t fake names are they, darling?”
The man didn’t answer.
Cara sighed. The strong silent act got old awfully quickly with her. “I’m here to meet with a certain, Madam, boys,” she said. “And as lovely and handsome as you lot are; you can’t beat a woman for a good chat, can you? And you bunch have roughly the same conversational skills as a group of clams. So, if you could lead me to Madam Estelle I’d be much obliged.”
“You are here to make a purchase,” Monsieur Cinq said. It was not a question.
“Obviously, darling,” Cara said, smiling the sort of smile that an unwary lumberjack might catch a glimpse of before he was set upon by something with large claws and a hell of an appetite.
“What sort of purchase would that be?”
The notoriously – as notorious as it was possible to be in the clandestine world of national intelligence, that is – efficient British spy, Cara Capello, checked a rising anger. It had taken her and her team of intelligence boffins weeks of careful investigating, bribery and blackmail to get her into the back room of this Parisian bakery.
La Perle Blanche – The White Pearl – was one of Paris’ most highly regarded patisseries, located on Rue de Montorgueil. It sold many of France’s most iconic sweet treats for exorbitant prices – a puits d’amour for eleven euros was standard – and was also an elaborate front for one of the most successful and profitable people smuggling syndicates in the world. Hiding in plain sight, frequented by France’s aristocracy, celebrities from all over the world and visited weekly by the manager of the French football team, The White Pearl made about ninety-five percent of its income smuggling drugged refugees out of warzones in eastern Europe and Africa so that they could be bought like cattle by pimps, drug-dealers and morally and ethically unencumbered business owners in countries such as France, Belgium, Switzerland and Germany.
Cara was a fairly liberal-minded person. She didn’t really give a shit if someone wanted to shoot up heroin day in and day out until they followed the dragon all the way to the edge of the universe and expired – that was their choice. She accepted that so long as there were people in the world, and some of those people felt like they needed to make laws, there would also be people out there willing to break them. There were a host of reasons that criminal entrepreneurs ended up peddling guns, drugs, fake currency, explosives and chemicals. Money was the primary motivator, obviously, with religion coming in a close second. She didn’t ask questions when she was sent out to bring a rule-breaker down, she just did it.
But one thing that Cara Capello couldn’t stand for and wholeheartedly disagreed with was the transportation and manipulation of human beings. The idea of taking someone from their war-torn home, luring them with promises of a better life for them and their family – when what you actually planned on doing was selling them to a Spanish tomato farmer so that he could pay them ten euros a day to pick his tomatoes, all the while holding the threat of deportation over them like the slave-drivers of old held the whip – was a thought that set her teeth on edge.
It had taken very little convincing by her superiors to get her to take this particular job. It was imperative that she get to the woman who continued to perpetuate these humanitarian atrocities. Get to her, and then carve her apart.
“Madam Diana?” the man asked, shaking her from her recollections.
“Yes, darling?”
“You wish to make a purchase, yes?”
“Of course I wish to make a purchase, and if you need me to fucking spell it out for you then here it is: I need to organise the importation of a dozen healthy women to London so that I can put them on the books of my ‘massage parlour’.” She tipped the man a huge wink. “And if I have to wait about for any more of your stupid fucking questions then I might just decide to shove that custard gun up your ass and turn you into the world’s biggest éclair. Now, where the fuck is Madam Estelle?”
The man styling himself as Monsieur Cinq bore the brunt of Cara’s icy wrath like a tree weathering a blizzard; with unflinching stoicism.
When she was finished he said, “Madam Estelle does not just let anyone come before her. She is in a, ah, delicate business you might say. Not she does not let just anyone come in front of her. Not before they have come in front of us. Not until they have proven to her five lieutenants that they are willing to do anything to gain an audience with her.
“I’m here, aren’t I?” Cara said. “I’ve paid for the opportunity to stand before you gentlemen. I have money standing by to complete this transaction. How else can I prove my willingness to conclude this business deal?”
As one, the five suited men smiled. A blonde man in the middle started to unlace his shoes, whilst another loosened his tie.
“Ah,” Cara said. “I see.” She gave a crooked smile. “How very French, darlings.”
