Free Luc: A Spy Thriller by Greg Coppin Page A

‘Would standing under a teetering building scare you, Mr Luc? Because that’s what Giuttieri is like. He’s there. He’s always there. And he could crush you at any time.’ She shrugged again. ‘Or not.’ She looked to be late fifties, but I believe she was almost a decade younger than that.
    ‘You mentioned his younger days…’ I said.
    Vivienne got up and noisily cleared her throat. ‘I need a cigarette. Have you seen any cigarettes since you’ve been here?’ she asked, looking around.
    I pointed with my thumb. ‘I think I saw a packet on the kitchen fitment when I walked in.’
    ‘Good boy. Well done. Ah,’ she said, entering the kitchen area. ‘Here you are.’
    She offered me one but I declined. She sat back down on the sofa and took satisfying draws on the cigarette.
    ‘E.G. The younger years.’ She laughed to herself. ‘The young Giuttieri was a talented scholar. Yes. He was a quiet boy. Studious. He came from a good family. The road ahead for him was assured and promising.
    ‘He got into a good university. He was reading Physics. And from what I’ve been able to gather, he was not only very good at it, he had set his sights on devoting his life to uncovering many of the unknowns in that scientific world.’
    ‘So what happened?’ I asked.
    ‘What happened was his sister.’
    ‘How do you mean?’
    ‘Ernesto loved his sister. He loved his whole family. When he went to university, he would phone his sister every night to speak to her. And every night, according to her friends, she would eagerly pick up the phone to speak to him. Except one night…she didn’t.’
    Vivienne pulled a face and looked at her cigarette. ‘I’m either losing my taste buds, or they’re weakening these things,’ she said. ‘The nicotine equivalent of watering them down.’ She looked earnestly up at me. ‘What do you reckon?’
    ‘I don’t know. What happened to the sister?’
    Vivienne cleared her throat again. Busily tapped some ash into a saucer on the coffee table. ‘Raped,’ she eventually said. ‘Four men. Her throat cut. Her body dumped in a garbage truck. She was coming home from an evening out with her friends in Cobán. Young Ernesto…didn’t take it well.’
    ‘When did this happen?’
    ‘It’s about twenty-five years ago.’
    ‘What did Giuttieri do?’
    ‘Giuttieri… well, first he went quiet. Sullen. Brooding. His work began to fall off a cliff. From being an A student he was suddenly mopping up the Fs. Then… well, then he took a bunch of guys and tracked down the four men who had raped and murdered his sister. And he did… things to them. He tortured them, Mr Luc. And then he killed them. Which, after the third day, no doubt came as a sweet mercy for them.’
    ‘Three days ?’
    She nodded. ‘And now he had a gang. A feared gang. And,’ she raised a finger, ‘and this is just my guess, I have no proof, but it occurred to me as I was researching him that now he’s experiencing something that he’s never truly had before.’ She leaned forward. ‘Control.’ She almost breathed the word.
    ‘Up until this point he’s been the good little boy, doing what’s expected. Not in control. The biggest loss of control was what happened to his sister. He wasn’t there, couldn’t do anything about it. Wasn’t in control.
    ‘But now, taking on these men, defeating these men, he’s suddenly suffused with a feeling of control. And this,’ she highlighted the point with a stab of her finger, ‘is what sowed the seeds for everything that came after for him. His life simply became one of wanting more and more control. Of gangs, of money, of women, of businesses.’
    ‘So he dropped the studies, became a gang leader, got into businesses, bigger businesses...’
    She nodded. ‘Anything he could control, he did. His appetites just got bigger and bigger.’
    ‘And today?’
    ‘Today he’s at the top of the tree. He controls everything he looks at. But is he satisfied? I doubt it.