Time Is a Killer

by Michel Bussi

  I’ve counted about fifteen Idrissis around the table. It’s long and narrow, essentially a large plank resting on four trestles, its dimensions calculated precisely so that the groups can’t mingle. At one end, the men are talking about politics, the environment, heritage, things I would love to hear about but can’t, only scattered words such as taxation, speculation, pre-empt. At the other end, the teenagers and the kids. And in the middle the women, almost hidden by the large bunches of yellow roses brought by Papa; they’re talking among themselves, but I’m sure they’re discussing other subjects, and most of them are speaking Corsican. Deliberately, so that Maman doesn’t understand?

  Maman yawns, in her black dress with the red roses, the one that Papa bought for her in Calvi. She’s bored. You would never guess that in less than an hour, after the aperitif, she’ll leave the Idrissi tribe with him, and climb up to share a loving tête-à-tête at Casa di Stella, while the rest of the familia, apart from the outsiders like me and Nicolas, will drive over to the church of Santa Lucia and the inevitable concert by A Filetta.

  Quite honestly, it feels as if Maman would like to get going as soon as possible, while Papa would like to stay a bit longer. Seen like that, their night together looks like a bit of a compromise, something that won’t satisfy either one.

  Is that, my trusted companion, what married life is like? Is that what adulthood is about: compromises? Settling for a freedom that is half-baked?

  Once they’re up there, what will my secretive parents talk about? The Liguro-Provencal current and the dolphins you can see from the Aryon? The Revellata lighthouse and its rotating lens? Or perhaps they’ll talk about nothing, everything, us. They will make white flags from the tablecloth they eat on, the sheets between which they will make love, a yearly truce, like peace on earth on Christmas Eve.

  I don’t know. I don’t really care either. To tell you the truth, I’ve already moved away, I’m sitting on my bench, hidden, headphones on my ears, Mano Negra in the background, so that I can write to you in peace. The drinks, given the time, must be coming to an end; it will soon be nightfall. Even I’m starting to doze off after my almost sleepless night.

  I reread my words.

  Perhaps I even fell asleep between two of them.

  Everything was calm, my phrases neatly laid out, I was lulled by music, when all of a sudden I heard shouting.

  It’s like a fight in the yard; I think I can hear conflict, tears.

  I wonder if I should go and see what’s happening. But not for long. I don’t care much about the settling of scores among the Idrissi family. I put my headphones back on and turn up the volume, way up.

  Perhaps I even fall asleep again.

  *

  * *

  He turned over.

  He discovered one more handwritten page.

  The last one.

  After that, all the others were blank.

  52

  23 August 2016, 10 a.m.

  When Clotilde stepped inside Calvi police station on the Route de Porto, the atmosphere seemed fairly relaxed. Not really the HQ of a team of investigators working at full steam; clearly the experts in Calvi kept a cooler head than the ones in Miami. Captain Cadenat was reading L’Equipe over a bottle of Corsica Cola. He looked up and seemed genuinely delighted to see her.

  ‘Madame Baron?’ he said with the over-attentive politeness of a shopkeeper greeting the first customer of the day.

  The beautiful lawyer didn’t seem to be in the mood for pleasantries, however. The policeman folded his newspaper, set down his Cola, and seemed to feel obliged to justify his idleness.

  ‘Have you come about Orsu Romani? He’s in the next room. He has company. The DPP in Ajaccio sent over two inspectors this morning, they’re taking charge of the case. Clearly Cervone Spinello had some influence, and his murder has caused a stir. So the local brigade here is left twiddling our thumbs – although we’re also on fire duty, since people seem to think the whole place is about to go up in flames.’

  The policeman appeared to think his duty was done, and that he could unfold his newspaper again, but Clotilde had already stepped forward and put her hand on the door handle of the room in which Orsu was being questioned. Cadenat suddenly panicked.

  ‘Madame Baron, no …’

  He cursed and crumpled his newspaper into a ball, knocking over his Corsica Cola.

  ‘You can’t go in there! The big bosses are grilling him!’

  Clotilde stared straight into his eyes.

  ‘I am his lawyer.’

  That didn’t seem to impress the rugby player.

  ‘Oh? Since when?’

  ‘Since right now! And by the way, my client hasn’t been fully briefed.’

  Cadenat hesitated. Clotilde Baron wasn’t bluffing, he had known about her profession since she gave her statement ten days before. And after all, the idea that, by bursting into the interrogation room, this lawyer might mess up the plans of the bigwigs from Ajaccio didn’t bother him at all.

  ‘Sort things out with them,’ he said at last. ‘And if the special units of Southern Corsica don’t throw you out, well, good luck … Your client isn’t the chattiest witness we’ve ever had on the island. You might even say that he takes the notion of omertà to a level that’s almost sublime: according to our preliminary investigation, he’s never uttered more than three words in a row since he was born.’

  Clotilde stepped into the room. Orsu was facing her. The two policemen, wearing grey suits and ties, had their backs to her. They turned round in unison, like poker-players in a saloon when the door swings open. She wouldn’t have been surprised if they’d knocked over the table to use it as a shield while drawing their revolvers.

  Fast … But not fast enough!

  Clotilde was the first to draw.

  ‘Maître Idrissi.’

  She held her card up under their noses, a card that gave her name as Maître Clotilde Baron, but they didn’t read it; the title – informing them she was a lawyer – and the name had the desired effect.

  The older of the two, who wore a pair of thin rectangular glasses, was the first to compose himself.

  ‘To my knowledge, Monsieur Romani did not mention having a lawyer of any kind.’

  Shall we see about that? Let’s up the stakes.

  Orsu was still frozen in his usual inexpressive state, but Clotilde took advantage of a vague movement of his hand to claim her victory.

  ‘Well, I am. Two points, gentlemen, two important points. The first is that Monsieur Orsu Romani, henceforth my client, also happens to be my half-brother. The second, which is quite obvious, is that my client is innocent.’

  The two points left a silence.

  It was a lot to take in all at once.

  The name of Idrissi, for one thing. The two inspectors had the ideal suspect – a mentally disabled person with a criminal record, overwhelming circumstantial evidence, no one was going to defend an almost mute outsider – and now, from up his sleeve, he produced a lawyer, a lawyer whose name announced her status: a lawyer who was also a blood relative!

  Clotilde mightn’t have won the game, but she did know the law. For any infringement of the criminal law the lawyer was not obliged to be present at the first interrogation: the preliminary hearing had only to keep her informed about the case. The lawyer could speak to the accused only after questioning, for a maximum period of thirty minutes. In the face of these two poker-players she had no option but to bluff.

  ‘I expect you’ve had time for an initial interrogation of my client? I would like to be able to talk to him on his own.’

  ‘We hadn’t finished,’ said the younger of the two men, the one with a small goatee.

  Translation: the dumbass hasn’t said a word in an hour of grilling.

  ‘My client will talk to you. My client will talk to you after I have had a conversation with him.’

  Apart from the way his eyes were fixed on Clotilde, Orsu showed no sign of compliance.

  The
two policemen glanced at one another.

  The name of Idrissi forced them to play a cautious game, they were aware of treading on dangerous ground. The suspect seemed perfectly capable of withstanding forty-eight hours in custody, even seventy-two, without opening his mouth, even if he needed to pee. What did they have to lose by letting this lawyer, who had just fallen from the sky, try to help out?

  ‘Thirty minutes, no more,’ said the policeman with the spectacles.

  They left.

  They left Clotilde and her half-brother alone together.

  Or not entirely. Orsu had another friend, an ant that was strolling along the table in front of him. His sole fixation seemed to be to put his finger in the right place so that the insect would agree to climb it. Clotilde was expecting a monologue, although she wasn’t used to it. Normally, in divorce cases, her female clients tended to be loquacious about the wrongs committed by the partners from whom they wanted to separate.

  ‘I’m going to put my cards on the table, Orsu. We’ll talk about our father later, if you like. But first of all, I’d like to sort out the matter at hand.’

  The only thing that moved was his left index finger, cutting off the ant’s retreat.

  ‘First of all, I know you didn’t kill that bastard, so I’m going to get you out of here, trust me.’

  The ant attempted to get away in a series of desperate zigzags. A thumb and a middle finger closed the circle.

  ‘Secondly, I know you understand very well what’s being said to you, but you don’t want to let it show. You also know much more than you want to admit. Like Bernardo in Zorro. So if you want me to help you, I’ll need a bit of give and take, my little brother.’

  The ant went round and round in a circle. For the first time, Orsu raised the same eyes towards Clotilde as he had when she’d yelled at the stupid teenagers in the shower block at the Euproctes. Shy and embarrassed eyes that begged her to leave things as they were, that seemed to murmur ‘let it go’, ‘I don’t deserve this’, ‘thank you, but you didn’t need to’. Expressing all that in a single look was proof that Clotilde had gained his trust, even if Orsu still wasn’t ready to speak to a stranger.

  She rummaged in her bag and placed two pieces of paper on the table, then ran her finger along the final lines of the first.

  My whole life is a dark room.

  Kisses,

  P.

  Then the second.

  Wait there. He will come and guide you.

  Wrap yourself up, it’s bound to be a bit cold.

  He will lead you to my dark room.

  ‘I just want an answer, Orsu. Just a name. Who wrote that?’

  She could go on talking; he was only interested in the ant.

  ‘Was it my mother? Was it Palma who wrote those letters?’

  Ask the question again, communicating via antennae …

  ‘Do you know her? Have you seen her? Do you know where she is?’

  The ant panicked, imprisoned, trapped. Clotilde thought of crushing it with her thumb, just to get a reaction from this mollusc.

  ‘Damn it, Orsu, it’s her handwriting, they’re your fingerprints, you brought me these letters, you guided me to the cabin in the maquis that night. But … but I saw my mother die in that car accident, I saw her crash against the rocks. So please, if you know the truth, tell me before I go mad.’

  Suddenly, after hesitating for one last time, the ant climbed on to Orsu’s hairy finger.

  ‘Campa sempre.’

  Clotilde didn’t understand.

  ‘Campa sempre,’ her half-brother repeated.

  ‘I don’t speak Corsican, little brother, what does that mean?’ She passed him one of the sheets of paper and picked up a pen from the desk. ‘Can you write it down for me?’

  Slowly, and with hesitant, childish handwriting, Orsu wrote, taking care not to disturb the ant that was now running about on his forearm.

  Campa sempre.

  Clotilde ran from the room and held the sheet of paper up beneath the noses of the two policemen from Ajaccio.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  The two men looked at the words, studied them, then shook their heads as if it were written in Sumerian. Clotilde cursed, she didn’t want to hear their excuses, hear them say that they were only civil servants who had been transferred there from the mainland and didn’t speak a word of Corsican … English, yes, Italian, at a stretch, but the bloody language of the island itself … She strode past the rugby player from Béziers without even stopping. He wasn’t going to be any use either.

  Campa sempre.

  Damn it, this was all she needed, to find herself in a police station in Calvi without anyone who could translate two words of Corsican for her. She thought of running out into the street, standing in the middle of it and stopping the first person who came past.

  Campa sempre.

  A sound from the next room made her start.

  The toilet door opened. The cleaning woman came out. She wore a headscarf and a blue tunic edged in gold: Moroccan, like a tenth of the local inhabitants. With her bucket and mop she inevitably reminded Clotilde of Orsu. Clotilde stepped forward and held the scribbled piece of paper level with the woman’s eyes.

  ‘Campa sempre,’ the Moroccan woman read with an impeccable Corsican accent.

  Clotilde’s hopes soared.

  ‘Please. What does it mean?’

  The woman looked at her as if it were obvious.

  ‘Alive. Still alive.’

  53

  Wednesday, 23 August 1989

  Bruise-blue sky

  ‘Clo?’

  I sulkily take off my headphones. I prefer Manu’s voice to my brother’s.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘We’re off.’

  Off where?

  I sigh. I wake up. I’m still a bit zonked. The stones of the wall cut into my back and the splinters from the bench scratch my thighs. There’s silence at Arcanu Farm, you’d almost think everyone else had gone.

  But gone where?

  I close my eyes, I see the faces of the Idrissi clan around the table, the yellow roses, the Clos Columbu wine, their noisy conversation. I open my eyes. Nico is standing there in front of me, looking like a union representative, or a negotiator with the special forces, the kind of person who bargains with robbers holed up in a bank to get the hostages out one by one.

  That’s not going to work with me!

  Manu Chao in my ears, singing about a heart that’s been consumed. I turn the volume up again. I don’t want to leave my weird dream. I sit down, pick up my notebook and my pen.

  I’m still drowsy, I don’t know how long I’ve been asleep for, or really where I am. It’s nearly dark, it was broad daylight when I dozed off.

  I emerge slowly …

  So about that dream, shall I tell you about it before it evaporates? Before I go back to sleep? You’ll be amazed!

  You know what?

  You were there, my visitor from the future. You were in my dream!

  Yes, honest truth, or rather, not you exactly, but that weird dream happened in your time, a long time from now. Not ten years, or thirty, even longer than that. I’d say at least fifty years from now.

  Nicolas is still standing in front of me. He looks annoyed.

  ‘Clo, everyone’s waiting for you. Papa isn’t going to …’

  Papa?

  Did I miss an episode? Has Papa changed his plans?

  My eyes slide, for a moment, to the moon in the sky, the reflection of its twin in the sea, and I start writing even faster. My beloved reader mustn’t get cross with me if I haven’t time to finish one of my sentences, if one of my words is left hanging, if I leave you waiting for more. It’ll be because Papa has grabbed me, gripped my arm and forced me to follow him, leaving behind my notebook and my pen. So I’ll send you a kiss right now and say see you soon just in case we don’t have time for a hug later.

  I’ll continue.

  In front of me, Nicolas is pulling a stra
nge face, it looks as if during my dream a kind of apocalypse has befallen the island, a meteorite has crashed right in the middle of the yard, a tsunami has uprooted the big oak.

  Quick … I mustn’t go or my dream will fly away.

  My dream takes place close by, but a long time from now, on Oscelluccia beach – I recognised the rocks, the sand, the shape of the bay. They are still the same. But not me, I’ve grown old. A grandmother. The rest isn’t the same either. Strange buildings have sprouted among the red rocks, built with weird materials, almost transparent, like in science fiction – a bit like the ones Maman designs. Only the pool looks the same as today, a big pool and I’m dipping my wrinkled old feet into it.

  I’ll speed up, OK, I’ll speed up. I can hear footsteps, Papa’s footsteps. In my dream of the future Natale is there too. In the pool there are children, perhaps they’re mine, my children or my grandchildren, I’m not sure. All I know is that I’m happy, that no one around me is missing, everyone is there, as if nothing has changed in fifty years, as if no one has died; as if, in the end, the passage of time is innocent, and we’re wrong to accuse it, to call it a murderer …

  *

  * *

  He stared into space.

  The diary ended with that word.

  Murderer.

  He read it again one last time and then closed the notebook.

  54

  23 August 2016, 10.30 a.m.

  Clotilde had been here before, but at night.

  At night, guided by Orsu.

  By day, she had no idea how to find the shepherd’s cabin. The landmarks were vague: cross a river, then climb a steep slope and pass through endless scrubland.

  She had been wandering around the maquis for an eternity after parking her car at the foot of the path that led to Casa di Stella, the very place where she had waited for Orsu at midnight – doors left open, keys in the engine, she didn’t care. She had left the police behind at Calvi station.