The Whiz Mob and the Grenadine Kid

Charlie was on vacation. At least, that was how his father had suggested he view his current predicament. To that end, the last few years of his life were a kind of series of vacations. To you this might seem like a very good deal for a twelve-year-old boy, which Charlie was. However: if your life was just a series of vacations, one after another, you’d probably find the prospect of yet one more vacation pretty boring, which was how Charlie felt about the whole situation.
You see, Charlie’s father was Charles Fisher, Senior. You are forgiven if you don’t recognize the name; this all happened well before your time. No doubt your grandparents would be very familiar with Charles Erasmus Fisher Sr., the noted American diplomat, the one who had married the young German heiress Sieglinde Dührer in a well-publicized ceremony on the veranda of the Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria. The same Fisher who brokered the Reykjavík Accords and settled, once and for all, the long and bloody Greco-Hungarian War. But, sadly, it is his marriage that overshadows his great accomplishments as a warrior for peace. Charlie’s mother, Sieglinde, was a beautiful woman, a stage actress of some renown, and Charles Sr. had fallen for her while on a trip to Vienna a few years after the end of World War II. Their marriage was short and spectacular and managed to produce a good deal of ink for the Washington gossip rags, not to mention Charlie Jr. himself, but by the time of Charlie’s seventh birthday, they’d been separated long enough that the divorce, when it came, was a mere formality. Charlie had barely known his father, a man who had spent a fraction of his married life at the family’s brick townhouse in Georgetown, Washington, DC. The boy received regular postcards, written in his father’s impeccable hand, from such exotic locales as Moscow, Buenos Aires, and Yokohama, but Charlie could count on one hand the number of nights he’d actually had his father read at his bedside. Sieglinde, along with a host of assistants, nannies, and governesses, was Charlie’s only real family. So it was a great surprise to Charlie when his mother told him one morning, in no uncertain terms, that she had grown very tired of being a mother and that Charlie was to live with his father from here on out. Sieglinde would be happy to consider herself a kind of “cool aunt” to Charlie, should he ever need one.
What could Charlie do? Being a boy of nine years at the time, very little. The housemaid, Penny, helped him pack his most prized and portable possessions (which amounted to: seven books, a suitcase of clothes, and a box of green army men) and kissed his forehead as she saw him seated in the backseat of a Lincoln Continental. He was driven to the airport and there put on a plane to Morocco, where his father (or someone) would be waiting to receive him. He was to live the life of a professional diplomat’s child from this point forward, forever passing from one world to another, Toronto to Bombay to Vladivostok, his weeks and months a seemingly never-ending parade of vacations.
And he couldn’t have been more bored.
Which was precisely what he was feeling when he was sitting in Place Jean Jaurès in Marseille, on that warm Tuesday morning in April. If you were as world-wise and world-weary as Charlie was, you would know that Marseille is a very famous French port town on the Mediterranean Sea. And if you’d spent as much time as Charlie had on airplanes, hacking through a reading list that had been prescribed by your tagalong tutor, you’d know that Edmond Dantès, the hero of Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, had lived out his imprisonment in the Château d’If, which sat on a small island off the coast of Marseille. And if you’d received as many lectures on safety as Charlie had by his stern father and his small army of assistants and secretaries, you’d know that many consider Marseille to be something of a thieves’ paradise.
The idea excited Charlie – a haven for the criminal underbelly of the world, here in his own backyard. It was a welcome change from Zurich’s sterile and modern avenues, from Hong Kong’s restricted zones. It was the sort of thing that got Charlie’s twelve-year-old imagination firing on all cylinders. However, once he’d spent a few weeks at his new home, he soon realized that if there was one epidemic currently endangering the lifeblood of Marseille, it was this: tourists.
Noisy, complaining tourists.