Marquanteur And The Mafia Of Marseille: France Crime Thriller

By Alfred Bekker

Marquanteur And The Mafia Of Marseille: France Crime Thriller

by Alfred Bekker

 

 

Authoritative people from two opposing mafia clans in Marseille are shot dead, the perpetrator leaves a clear sign but no traces. He seems driven by hatred. Commissaire Marquanteur and his colleague Leroc are groping in the dark as the series of murders continues. But criminals from both organizations are also looking for the killer.

 

Alfred Bekker is a well-known author of fantasy novels, thrillers and books for young people. In addition to his major book successes, he has written numerous novels for suspense series such as Ren Dhark, Jerry Cotton, Cotton Reloaded, Kommissar X, John Sinclair, and Jessica Bannister. He has also published under the names Neal Chadwick, Jack Raymond, Jonas Herlin, Dave Branford, Chris Heller, Henry Rohmer, Conny Walden, and Janet Farell.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alfred Bekker
• Release date: Oct 2, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223930006

Alfred Bekker

Alfred Bekker wurde am 27.9.1964 in Borghorst (heute Steinfurt) geboren und wuchs in den münsterländischen Gemeinden Ladbergen und Lengerich auf. 1984 machte er Abitur, leistete danach Zivildienst auf der Pflegestation eines Altenheims und studierte an der Universität Osnabrück für das Lehramt an Grund- und Hauptschulen. Insgesamt 13 Jahre war er danach im Schuldienst tätig, bevor er sich ausschließlich der Schriftstellerei widmete. Schon als Student veröffentlichte Bekker zahlreiche Romane und Kurzgeschichten. Er war Mitautor zugkräftiger Romanserien wie Kommissar X, Jerry Cotton, Rhen Dhark, Bad Earth und Sternenfaust und schrieb eine Reihe von Kriminalromanen. Angeregt durch seine Tätigkeit als Lehrer wandte er sich schließlich auch dem Kinder- und Jugendbuch zu, wo er Buchserien wie 'Tatort Mittelalter', 'Da Vincis Fälle', 'Elbenkinder' und 'Die wilden Orks' entwickelte. Seine Fantasy-Romane um 'Das Reich der Elben', die 'DrachenErde-Saga' und die 'Gorian'-Trilogie machten ihn einem großen Publikum bekannt. Darüber hinaus schreibt er weiterhin Krimis und gemeinsam mit seiner Frau unter dem Pseudonym Conny Walden historische Romane. Einige Gruselromane für Teenager verfasste er unter dem Namen John Devlin. Für Krimis verwendete er auch das Pseudonym Neal Chadwick. Seine Romane erschienen u.a. bei Blanvalet, BVK, Goldmann, Lyx, Schneiderbuch, Arena, dtv, Ueberreuter und Bastei Lübbe und wurden in zahlreiche Sprachen übersetzt.

Book preview

1

Hey, should we still go on the ghost train - or is that beneath the great Grand Timéo Spano?

Spano - a short, wiry man of about forty with black hair combed back and his chin jutting out - grinned wryly. Are you kidding me, or what is this now?

The big-breasted blonde at Spano's side towered over Grand Timéo by half a head.

Five broad-shouldered men in dark suits secured Grand Timéo Spano from all sides. Under the jackets of the bodyguards, their weapons were pressed out.

Hey, what is it, Timéo? the blonde asked now, thrusting her arms into her provocatively curved hips. I was serious about the ghost train! She extended her arm and pointed to a flashing neon sign. Very Loud Screams From Hell, it read. Bone hands protruded from the outside wall at irregular intervals, seeming to reach out and grab passersby, just causing a group of teenagers to shriek. Timéo Spano screwed up his face in annoyance and rolled his eyes.

Janine, this is kid stuff, he complained.

Oh, Timéo!

Yeah, right!

Secretly, Spano already knew he had lost. He simply couldn't refuse Janine anything - even if it meant that his image as a tough-as-nails capitano in the Malatesta family syndicate, part of the Calabrian 'Ndrangheta, would suffer somewhat if word got out that he was enjoying himself in a ghost train.

Janine laughed challengingly at him. Her voice sounded dark and seductive.

Listen, Timéo, we're here in the Parc d'Attractions de Marseille - nobody knows you there!

Timéo Spano's gaze was distracted by her deep décolleté, and he thought involuntarily: She just has other merits than a cultivated manner of expression. This meant that she was not exactly the kind of woman with whom he could have made an impression before his uncle Stephano Malatesta, the current head of the family business, but as long as Timéo Spano only enjoyed himself with Janine and neither intended to bring her to official family celebrations nor to marry her, this was all right even for the clan patriarch.

Timéo ... Please!

There was a flash in her eyes. If you let me get on the ghost train alone, I'll tell everyone that Grand Timéo Spano is afraid of ghosts.

Spano screwed up his face.

Don't make me angry, baby! he growled. But the very way he said it revealed that he was unlikely to manage to get really angry anymore. You know how angry I can get, he said, trying hard to keep the corners of his mouth down far enough.

You know I like it when you get angry, Timéo, Janine returned with a laugh. Her flawless teeth flashed as she did so. Her hair fell far over her shoulders. With an inimitable gesture, she brushed a strand from her face. Timéo Spano liked her just for the way she did it.

You've never experienced this before, sweetheart ...

Oh no?

No!

Timéo Spano's facial expression changed abruptly at that moment.

His features froze. The eyes became unnaturally large and emerged from their sockets. A mask of frozen horror formed in a split second. He raised his hand as if in an instinctive defensive movement.

A small red dot formed in the middle of his forehead and quickly grew larger. Janine let go of his arm and let out a cry of horror.

Timéo Spano swayed for another moment before he fell lengthwise to the ground like a felled tree and lay motionless. With a dull sound, his lifeless body hit the asphalt and remained lying in an unnaturally contorted position.

The bodyguards realized what had happened only after a delay of one or two seconds. They pulled out their weapons, ducked and stared searchingly around the area. Two of them bent protectively over their boss lying on the ground.

Shit, man! shouted the taller of them, crouching in a crouched position next to the man lying motionless.

He was just able to detect Spano's death before it hit him himself.

A hit to the upper body made him slump over his boss. The bullet passed through his body and tore a bloody hole where it exited. The smaller of the two bodyguards took a hit to the head, killing him instantly.

An attack out of nowhere - without even a hint of a defensive chance.

Janine stood there for a few seconds as if rooted to the spot and with her mouth open. She looked completely frozen and hardly dared to breathe. The shock was clearly written on her face.

Within a few moments, the other bodyguards also sank down, hit. Even before they had really understood from which direction they were actually being fired at, a jolt went through their bodies - like puppets being taken out of the game by their strings. Their bodies then slapped lifelessly on the ground. Not a single shot had been fired from any of their weapons to repel this attack.

A completely silent attack.

No sound of gunfire was heard. Passersby stopped, realized only after a delay of several moments what had happened, and then scattered in panic. Screams rang out with a delay of several seconds and propagated through the crowd as if in a domino effect.

Only moments later, this screaming swelled to such a deafening noise that even the pounding music from the speakers of the rides was lost in it.

2

There it is! said François, holding out his hand.

We were in a great hurry.

It was late afternoon when François and I reached the amusement park Parc d'Attractions de Marseille. It is located near the Parc de Ville. The Parc d'Attractions was once derided as Disneyland for the poor by the local media. But they were wrong. Even from outside, many came here to have fun in the various carousels such as Ferris wheels and roller coasters and stroll from booth to booth, which had something to offer for every taste, whether sweet or savory.

My colleague François Leroc and I had to park the sports car provided by the FoPoCri motor pool in a side street and walk the last five minutes to the scene. There was indescribable chaos. All the access roads to the parking lot were hopelessly congested.

The last meters are once again the worst, I said.

You have to fight your way through it, Pierre! returned my colleague François Leroc.

Colleagues from the Marseille police tried to coordinate as best they could the confusion of panicked passers-by who wanted to leave the area as quickly as possible and the emergency vehicles of the police and the emergency ambulance.

What the amusement park was about in general, we had already been informed.

Timéo Spano, an underboss of the Malatesta syndicate, a subgroup of the 'Ndrangheta, had been murdered with nearly half a dozen bodyguards, and we had reason to believe that this was part of a larger confrontation between different organized crime groups. Money laundering, drugs and weapons - these were areas in which the Malatesta family was doing business, according to our findings. And they did so with great success, because Malatesta had quickly punched his way up the hierarchy of the Marseille underworld.

But the competition was not sleeping.

A total of three other underbosses of the Malatesta syndicate had been killed within the last few months. Nobody could really believe in a coincidence anymore, especially since the same weapon had been used in all three cases.

It looked like Timéo Spano was number four on the list of this unknown killer who was cleaning up the Marseille underworld.

The only question was for whom he was doing it. The whole thing was probably part of a much broader confrontation between different syndicates that fought each other uncompromisingly and to the death in order to eliminate the competition.

The colleagues had cordoned off the actual scene of the crime over a wide area. François and I were stopped. I pulled out my ID and held it out to the colleague.

Pierre Marquanteur, FoPoCri, I introduced myself. This is my colleague François Leroc. Commissaire Ralph Dornier from the precinct in charge here has requested us.

I'm glad you're here. You are eagerly awaited, said the policeman.

We didn't make it earlier, unfortunately.

I can imagine. At this time of day, the streets are a mess if you're traveling from the direction of downtown Marseille.

You can say that again!

The officer pointed his arm and said, Go left at the snack stand until you get to the ghost train. That's where it happened.

I nodded. Thank you.

A little later, we had reached the actual scene of the crime. In addition to the uniformed colleagues, about a dozen officers were present there. In addition, there were the investigators of the homicide squad, the central recognition service of all Marseille police units, whose help was also frequently called upon by FoPoCri.

Two of the coroner's dark vans had somehow managed to get this far. Probably a third van would have to be called in to remove all the bodies.

We were presented with a picture of horror.

The dead had already been wrapped in body bags and prepared for transport to the coroner's office, but traces of dried blood all over the asphalt showed that something terrible had happened here. Chalk markings showed us where they had lain.

Commissaire Dornier was a red-haired, somewhat corpulent man. I knew him slightly. We had met from time to time when he was still the deputy head of the second homicide department of the Neustadt police station. In the meantime, he had been promoted and had taken over as head of the homicide department of another police station after the previous incumbent, Commissaire Gervais, had been killed in a shooting. That had been about three quarters of a year ago.

Hello Pierre! he said, greeting François as well. After we established the identity of one of the victims from his papers, we knew right away that this was a case for you.

Like this?

After all, Spano is part of the Malatesta syndicate, so a connection between this murder case and organized crime is more than obvious.

I nodded.

Someone seems to be systematically taking out Stephano Malatesta's underbosses one by one, I noted.

He nodded.

Gangster war. That's what everyone's talking about right now.

Yes - and probably just the beginning, François interjected.

The circumstances of the crime speak for a professional killer, Dornier opined. He must have hit with pinpoint accuracy from some elevated place in rapid succession of shots. None of the bodyguards were able to escape to safety. Until we find out the caliber, you'll have to be patient.

I bet the result coincides with the facts we know from the other cases in this series, François believed.

Dornier scratched the short-cropped red hair on the back of his head.

I'm guessing you guys have something of an overture to a full-blown bloodbath going on.

The only thing that surprises me about this is that Malatesta's reaction so far has been very calm, my friend and colleague François Leroc returned. In any case, we are not aware of a comparable death toll among members of competing syndicates.

Dornier grinned wryly.

Malatesta may be eager to maintain his image as a clean businessman and not be associated with this bloody quagmire - but at some point there will come a point when he will have to strike back if he wants to retain authority in his own ranks.

Where was the shooting from? I asked. For a moment I wondered how well Dornier knew about Malatesta. Most of what was known so far about Malatesta's organization could be accessed via the SIS data link system by all police units - including, therefore, the chief of a criminal investigation department in Pointe-Rouge. After all, no matter how good the fight against organized crime was, it was of no use if those who were first on the scene failed to recognize the connection that a homicide had to certain areas of organized crime. Repeatedly, we at FoPoCri had lost valuable time because the explosive nature of a crime had not been recognized quickly enough on the scene.

Dornier really could not be blamed in the slightest in this respect. He had been more than vigilant and had informed himself amazingly well about the background.

Dornier extended his arm and gestured over to a twelve-story building immediately adjacent to the park's grounds that had recently been completed but was not yet being used by the companies that had leased space there.

We assume that there was shooting from that building up ahead. Anyway, it has to be that direction.

I glanced over and squinted my eyes.

Must have been a good shot, though - from that distance!, I noted.

That's an estimated four hundred meters - if fired from one of the higher floors, even more, François indicated.

If the guy used a sniper rifle, that's a pretty standard distance, Dornier said. And the killer must have been a sniper. The shots followed each other very quickly, that he had very little time to aim. The perpetrator needed only one shot at a time to kill Spano and his men.

That fits the pattern, I noted, exchanging a glance with François.

The same weapon had always been used in the previous murders of members of the Malatesta syndicate. A special rifle of the MK-32 type, which had only been produced in relatively small numbers. The special commandos of some large cities used this weapon. In addition, it had been briefly considered to acquire the MK-23 for snipers in special units of the army and navy. Malicious tongues claimed that this had failed because of the competition's better relations with the Ministry of Defense.

In any case, I was willing to bet that this murder was also committed with the same MK-23 that had been used for the previous murders of Malatesta Syndicate leaders.

Of course, we could not expect confirmation of this until the ballistic tests were completed.

Timéo Spano, by the way, was in the company of a young woman, as several witnesses have testified in agreement, Dornier reported. Blonde and big-breasted. A kind of man's dream made flesh. We did a composite sketch. Dornier sighed audibly before continuing. She disappeared.

Let's see how fast we find them when we put them on the APB, I said.

Dornier's cell phone rang at that moment. He said Yes several times and finally ended the call again. He then turned to François and me.

That was Inspector Grassner. He believes he has found the location of the shooter.

Let's take a look then, I suggested.

Dornier instructed one of his officers to stand in for him for a short time. Then we followed him across the amusement park and finally reached the adjacent area where the building was located. The area was still fenced off with a man-high board shack, which was pasted over with posters. Among them was a notice that an office building had been erected here, the rents for which were downright astronomical compared to other prices in Marseille.

The police colleagues had broken open the boarded-up access to the site. No work had been done here for some time.

Did you know that Timéo Spano had a financial stake in both this amusement park and this office tower here? asked Dornier almost casually.

Ralph, you'd think you'd been on the trail of this Spano for years, I said with a mixture of appreciation and amazement. You don't happen to be working double shifts and moonlighting for the DEA or our office, do you?

Dornier grinned wryly.

This is my district, Pierre, remember that!

I see.

And on my turf, I just like to know. That's just the way it is!

I didn't know Spano had so much spare change to afford projects of this magnitude, I admitted.

He will have been acting as a straw man for Malatesta,