Chapter 26: Season 8 - Montenegro

It was a four hour train journey to Bari and we made it just in time to board the evening ferry to Bar, or Antivari as the port is also known, in Montenegro. The downside was there were no cabins available and we spent the ten hour voyage across the Adriatic Sea in one of the saloons that had comfortable seating but snoring residents. Sleep was impossible; judging by the force and resonance of some of the snorers most of our fellow travellers were Wagnerian opera singers. However, the sleepless night allowed the Chevalier to give me details of why we were bound for Montenegro and the role I was to play.

A South American, Seňor Felipe Díaz de Ortega y Cobarrubias, who had close links with a Colombian drug cartel, was to hold a meeting at the Hotel Josip Broz Tito in Podgorica with the head of a gang allied to the Bulbul crime syndicate. But what really had set the alarm bells ringing throughout the security services of the EU and USA was that the cultural attaché at the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, Serbia, was also attending the meeting. The room where the meeting was to take place needed to be bugged and I was the bugger chosen to do it. ‘A silly bugger’ as Stephen Hardcastle would call me.

I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about until the Chevalier gave me an in depth appraisal of what the meeting might entail. The strategy of setting the Ivan and Bulbul Crime Syndicates at each other throats, wherein I had played a small but significant part, had worked better than expected. A few months after the card game in Marseilles the two syndicates came to blows and over the past year many gang members from both syndicates had been dispatched to where ever dead homicidal maniacs go, many sent there by their rivals in crime and some by Special Forces of various EU countries. However, much of the top brass of the syndicates, the executive branch of the businesses, had escaped the mayhem and were still around although a swath had been cut through the ranks of middle management.

“It’s like the army,” the Chevalier explained. “Grunts, the foot soldiers, suffered most of the casualties during the inter gang warfare but are easily replaced. The heads of the syndicates, the generals in charge, are so far away from the sharp end to be inviolable and are still in place; however the field officers, the individual gangs’ bosses and their immediate subordinates, have been obliterated and they are difficult to replace. There is a vacuum in a vital area of both crime syndicates’ management structure and we, that is the security services of the EU and USA, fear the Chinese are moving in to fill the vacuum.”

“Chinese! But the language diff...”

“The Chinese are turning out English speakers, or to be more accurate American speakers, by the university load. They will have more than enough to fill the ranks of middle management. Within both syndicates practically all communications between middle and top management was in English, and I suspect there are plenty of Chinese available who are also fluent in Arabic, French, Italian, Polish, Serbo-Croat or any other language you care to mention. The Chinese are meticulous and focussed. They are the most efficient of the countries that launch cyber-attacks on the EU and USA. The Russians and Iranians are close behind but the Chinese are also the world leader in how to disrupt a country’s infrastructure networks. Having them directing a major crime syndicate would be a double whammy, whatever that is.”

“But why would South Americans be concerned as to who runs a European crime syndicate?”

“A good question, Rafael. It is possible South American drug cartels will do a deal with a well-functioning, Chinese administrated, Bulbul crime syndicate rather than continuing with the hodge podge of disordered and leaderless gangs that currently comprise the Ivans Crime syndicate. At the moment South America supplies cocaine and its derivatives to the Ivans, and the East Asian drug lords supply heroin and its derivatives to Bulbul. There could be a seismic shift in the supply chain if South America also supplied Bulbul, leading to the demise of the Ivans with the Chinese dominated Bulbul becoming the premier crime syndicate in Europe and possibly North America. We need to discover what their plans are, and that is where you come in”.

“To plant a listening device?”

“Yes, but the room where the discussions take place will be electronically swept before the meeting, and anyone, other than the main men, will be scanned and searched before entering.”

“Even hotel staff?”

“Especially hotel staff. The Chinese will go through the hotel’s employment data base and look into the background of all the staff. The meeting is not due for a month and we want you on the hotel’s employment register before the Chinese start checking. Any new employees taken on afterwards will be suspected to be a plant and will not be allowed anywhere near the room.”

“How am I to get in the room to plant a device and then get back in again to remove it?”

The Chevalier gave his trade mark tigerish smile. “That is a work in progress.”

Great!

“You are a Godsend, Monsieur Planchette. I have been at my wits end wondering how the hotel kitchen was going to manage for a week without a full complement of Commis chefs on the Legumier station.”

Andre Montesano was Sicilian, and if you think the French are demonstrative then you haven’t met a Sicilian. He had gripped both my hands and then hugged me before delivering a smacking kiss on both cheeks – of my face I hasten to add. Signor Montesano was Deputy Head of Human Resources at the Hotel Josip Broz Tito, the department that in the past was known as Personnel. When I had asked at hotel reception if the hotel was looking for more staff I was directed to an office on the ground floor where Andre held sway. He was a bit sniffy at first; there was no shortage of waiters, but when I showed him my CV and he saw I had trained under Chef Zachery del Monde, the darling of the charcuterie set, he became overjoyed, hence his effusiveness. A Commis chef on the Legumier station, which to civilians is the vegetable preparation and cooking station of a hotel kitchen, had been taken ill. The substitute appointed was not up to the standard required by the chef de partie de legunmier. The hotel was waiting for another Commis chef, who was not expected to arrive for at least a week.

Andre picked up his phone and asked whoever answered the phone to come to his office and take charge of the newly appointed Commis chef. I supposed it would be the chef de partie, the chef in charge of the station, and I was correct. A long nosed, myopic, man eventually arrived in Andre’s office. He stared at me when introduced but probably only saw my outline. I wondered how such a person could run a busy kitchen station but he must have had a spatial awareness second to none. i worked a week with Lazlo Brinsky and never saw him once slice anything other than the vegetable he intended. He was quick to spot any malpractice in the steaming, boiling or sautéing of vegetables or the preparation of same. My years of vegetable prepping and cooking at the Vermilion Coast Hotel came to the fore and Lazlo gave me what for him passed as an accolade – ‘Not bad, Planchette’— when I presented my cooked vegetables for his inspection before they were fed to hordes of ravenous customers in the hotel restaurants.

I enjoyed working in a hotel kitchen again. It is a work place where one has to be switched on at all times. It is said most accidents happen in a kitchen – actually most happen in a bedroom but you know what I mean – and with steam, boiling water, sharp knives, wet floors, red hot ovens and grills, coupled with the volatility of head chefs in a hectic hotel kitchen, the accident rate could go off the Richter Scale if any of the inhabitants let their mind wander when decanting a gallon of hot soup or slicing a side of beef.

I lived in the barrack-like accommodation of the hotel staff. The Chevalier had a cosy hotel room elsewhere in Podgorica and would contact me when and if anything occurred that I should know about.

“The Chinese might have me on their radar and if so would soon pick you up if we had regular meetings,” he had said. “We think the Chinese will send in a team to check the hotel’s security and at the same hack into the personnel database...”

“Human Resources data base, Chevalier,” I said cheekily.

He grinned, allowing me my poke at him. “As you say, Rafael, the HR database.”

“Do we have any idea which room is going to be used as the meeting venue?”

“None whatever. There’s a choice of seven hundred rooms at the hotel so your guess is as good as mine.”

“What about the listening device?”

“The boffins are still working on it. We have three more weeks before the meeting takes place.”

A few days after our conversation a Chinese trade delegation visited Podgorica and stayed at the Hotel Josip Broz Tito. Coincidence? I think not. There were about a dozen of them and they wandered all over the place, poking and prying in every nook and cranny of the hotel. When one came strolling through the swing doors of the kitchen there was nearly a nasty accident.

“So sorry,” (not ‘solly’ you note?) the Chinese girl said, quite a tasty looking Chinese girl I have to say. “I was looking for the loo.” Her terminology indicated her English lessons had been taught by an English person and I, thanks to my brother-in-law, translated the word so the other kitchen staff in earshot could understand.

“She means the bogs,” I said in French.

I escorted ‘Susie Wong’ to the ladies restroom where she gave me a beaming smile before disappearing into that sacred place. “I haven’t heard the loo called a bog since I was in Accrington,” she said, leaving me bewildered.

‘What’s a ‘crington’?’ I wondered, ‘and why would a nice girl like her be in one?’

The departure of the Chinese delegation three days later also heralded the end of my employment as a Commis Chef when the fellow I was holding the fort for arrived. Actually he was a she; a strapping girl from Belarus by the name of Gerda. I was sorry to leave the kitchen as on the same day as my encounter with Susie Wong I had spied a beautiful girl dressed in white in the kitchen. Of course all the inhabitants of the hotel kitchen were dressed in cooks’ whites but even those utilitarian garments couldn’t disguise the sensuousness of the girl. It was the way she moved that caught my eye. I am particularly drawn to women who walk gracefully. Something about the way they glide effortlessly through a room indicates they could glide just as effortlessly into my bed and heart. It doesn’t always work out that way for me but Veronique Curtis, Annette Delacroix, Amelie Puissant, Vivienne Dubonnet and many of the mature ladies I encountered over the years, shared that same virtue of elegant locomotion, and all were wonderful lovers.

I couldn’t tell much else about the girl in white as her figure was clothed in work clothes and her hair hidden by the chef’s hat she wore. That indicated she was higher up the Brigade de Cuisine organisational tree than me. Commis Chefs wore bandannas around their heads but she wore the low crowned chef’s hat of a chef du partie. The higher up the tree the taller the chef’s hat becomes until a Head Chef (Chef de Cuisine) has to duck down when going through a doorway as his hat is so tall. She was the chef du partie at the Pattisier (Pastry) station and I doubt she was much older than me, possibly younger. To hold such an important position in the brigade du cuisine of a large and busy kitchen like the one in the Hotel Josip Broz Tito indicated she was on top of her job. Our eyes had met briefly when I was translating the Chinese girl’s English, and there was a flash of something between us. It might have been mirth when I used an English slang word for a toilet, but that would mean the woman in white understood English and French.

As Italian is to classical music so French is to high class cuisine. In any half decent kitchen the language describing the produce, cooking utensils, recipes, and the methods of cooking, is French. Thus, the inhabitants of a kitchen whatever their nationality spoke a version of the language known as kitchen French, good enough to prepare a meal fit for a king, or le roi, but not necessarily enough to have a conversation other than about food. Most of the workers in the hotel spoke English as their second language – American flavoured English, to be more accurate.

My chances of making myself known to the goddess in white were scuppered when I was replaced as Commis Chef by Iron Gerda and banished from the kitchen, or at least from the working area of the kitchen, to be reassigned as a waiter. In fact I became Andre Montesano’s new Best Friend. Since I was trained in all aspects of hotel work I was deployed by him to wherever and whenever there was a shortfall in staff. Consequently I spent time working behind the desk at reception, bar tending in one of the many bars in the hotel, and waiting tables in the Silver Service restaurant. The Hotel Josip Broz Tito had three restaurants/dining rooms. One for guests, one for off the street trade, and the Silver Service dining room for both. The latter was the most expensive restaurant and was where cordon bleu cuisine was served. The waiting staff for this restaurant thought themselves a cut above the waiters who worked the other dining rooms. ‘The Silver Service Set’, as we were known in the hotel, also provided Room Service, and I don’t mean the sexual kind; the hotel had an arrangement with the premier escort service in Podgorica for that.

The plan for me to bug the room where the meeting was to take place hinged on me being a waiter, more specifically a waiter assigned to Room Service, so it would appear the Gods were smiling on my, or rather Madeleine Crozier Beauregard’s, endeavours. The only other way a hotel worker could get into guests’ rooms, other than a clandestine meeting of minds and bodies of course, was as a chambermaid or cleaner and all the chambermaids and cleaners employed at the Hotel Josip Broz Tito were female. Montenegro, like all Balkan countries, was very macho oriented. No real man would be so girly as to make a bed or clean a toilet – that was women’s work. Balkan males were even a bit sniffy about male cooks but tolerated them if they were French. As French was the language of the kitchen environment they imagined all male chefs were French, although only four French cooks worked in the Hotel Josip Broz Tito kitchen and since I was reassigned now only three.

I eventually met the graceful pastry chef but it was out of the hotel and entirely by chance. A week after the departure of the Chinese delegation I had a text message from the Chevalier. We had been in Podgorica for ten days and had not had a face to face meeting in all that time. I don’t know what he was doing with his time, but I hoped it was something that would save me being sliced and diced by South American drug dealers, bludgeoned or shot by Bulbul gang members, or Kung Fu’d by Chinese triads. However, as the age of consent in Montenegro was 14 I suspect he was having lawful carnal knowledge of young girls, or maybe just one girl. His text had an address and a time; the meeting place was in a lane off Fruskogorska in the Malo Brdo area of the city, which was the other side of the River Moraca from the Hotel Josip Broz Tito. I decided to walk to the meet.

It was a pleasant walk; the main roads in Podgorica are wide and relatively free of traffic and lined with shade giving trees. However, once in the Malo Brdo district the roads were narrower and the grid system prevalent in the city had disappeared. I must have taken a wrong turning, or else didn’t translate the Cyrillic letters correctly on a street sign, as I found myself completely lost. My sense of direction, never the best, failed me completely in the maze of lanes and there was no one about to help me, even if they could have understood me. The majority of Montenegrins are Serbs, and although there were English, French, and Italian speakers in the hotel the vast majority of the inhabitants of Podgorica were monolingual Serbo-Croat speakers.

I heard the sound of a motor scooter and scrambled to get out of the way as the road, lane, I was on had no footway and was quite narrow. When the scooter pulled up alongside me I was amazed to see the rider was the Pastry chef.

“Are you lost?” she said in English. I nodded, and then showed her my scrappy piece of paper with the address. “You’re kilometres out of your way. Hop on the back and I’ll give you a lift.” She restarted the engine and wheeled the scoter around and I got on behind her.

“I hope I’m not taking up your time. I don’t want to make you late for work,” I said, grabbing her around the waist as the scooter shot off.

“I have the day off, and you had better release your death grip else I won’t be able to breath.”

I hurriedly disengaged and she laughed. “I didn’t say to let go, just don’t hang on so tightly.” I tentatively placed my hands on her hips and she opened the throttle of the scooter – a Vespa, I think – and we hurtled down the narrow twisting lane at Mach 2.

Ten minutes later I reopened my eyes. “Are we there?” I croaked.

“Go up that track on the right of the hairdressers and take the first left.”

I dismounted and stood on shaky legs. “Thank you very much – err - What is your name? I only know that you are the chef du partie pattisier...”

“My name is Katarina,” she said pushing her hair from out of her eyes. She had worn no helmet and her shoulder length lustrous light brown tresses had whipped about like a silken cat of nine tails as she drove the scooter.

I held out my hand, which after a hesitant moment she took. “I’m Rafael Planchette,” I said. We shook hands gazing into each other’s eyes; hers were bewitching, amber in colour and deep. I fell in them and love at the same time.

“Do you think you will be able to find your way back to the hotel from here?” She asked, breaking eye contact but not the crackle of sexual attraction generated between us.

“Yeah, no problem. I’m like Chingachgook when it comes to following a trail.”

She laughed; a waterfall of delightful sound. “Well, as long as you’re not like Magua and can’t find your way home without killing Redcoats.”

“You have read ‘The Last of the Mohicans?”

“No, but many years ago I saw the BBC TV series. The man who played Magua was tremendous. There was no one else on the screen when he appeared.”

“And I suppose no Redcoats standing when he left?”

Once again the laughter that made the world seem a better place ensued.

Katarina looked at her watch. “I have to be off, but If you want a lift back to the hotel I will be back here in an hour’s time.” She started the scooter and drove off before I could make reply.

I followed her directions and arrived at a workshop with a name in Cyrillic so had no idea what was produced in the shop, but noticed a welding kit, a bench with a primitive looking lathe, and what could have been a furnace but was cold and looked unused.

The Chevalier greeted me with a wide smile. “Pierre bet me you’d get lost.”

A grinning Pierre Dubois rose from a chair and bear hugged me. “The Chevalier is having a laugh. I knew full well you’d find us OK, mon ami.”

We sat around a table and the Chevalier brought me up to date with events. As suspected the Chinese trade delegation had been cover for a reconnaissance of the hotel and its security.

“We know they hacked the HR data base and will now be going through the list of employees and digging up everything on record about them.” The Chevalier said. “They would also have hacked into the CCTV system and will have eyes on all and everyone in the hotel. We believe the meeting is to be in Room six six six, a suite on the top floor, but that could change. As for bugging the room, we have here a waiters’ trolley, modified to take a recording device, with a switch to initiate it. Show him how it works, Pierre.”

Pierre got from his chair and wheeled a typical hotel waiter’s trolley over from where it had been by the bench with the lathe.

“One of our operatives designed this and had it constructed off radar, that is off the radar of our own Intelligence agencies just in case there are informers, leaks or bugs in our communications. The Chinese are masters of infiltration.” Pierre pulled one of the trolley wheels out from the hollow tubed strut holding it. “The listening device,” he showed me a cylindrical shaped item covered with some type of fabric with no obvious signs of it being electrical, “slides into the end, so.” He pushed the cylinder into the hollow strut and replaced the wheel. “The listening device is inert, that is it gives out no indication of electrical energy until switched on.” He grabbed hold of the push bar on the trolley and pushed downwards. I heard a slight click. “That’s it switched on. Switch it off by pushing the bar down again.” ‘He did as described and once again I heard a faint click.

“It’s possible the scanners used by Chinese security at the meeting could detect the device even when inert, but the carbon fibre impregnated cover over the metal shell should mask the magnetic signature of the device and not set off the alarms,” Pierre said. “Of course once it’s switched on it could be detected, but it is unusual to have scanners working in the room when a meeting is taking place. Portable phones are known to set off alarms, and there have been occasions when an alarm was activated by a Pacemaker!”

“Attendees could be told not to bring their portables to the meeting, and I think it unlikely any one at this meeting; crime bosses, drug dealers, and Chinese triads, would be fitted with a Pacemaker. So what happens if there are scanners working during the meeting and the recording device sets off an alarm?”

“You’re fucked,” Pierre said nonchalantly.

“We have a team ready to extract you should that happen,” the Chevalier said, throwing an angry glare at Pierre.

“Will Pierre be doing that?”

“That depends on what else is going down at the time, but a backup team will be booked in as guests on the day of the meeting.”

“If I need extracting?”

Pierre gave a snaggletoothed smile. “Yeah, and I promise to return what’s left of you to your parents.”