With me, it was after the love that everything fell apart, that I stopped giving and didn’t know how to take. After the love, I went back on the other side of my border. Back to the territory where I have my own rules, my own laws, my own code, and my own stupid obsessions. The territory where I lose my way, and where I lost the women who ventured onto it.
I could have taken Leila there, into that desert. But all she’d have found at the end of the road would have been sadness, anger, tears and loathing. She wouldn’t have found me, because I’m a coward, a runaway, afraid to go back over the border and see how things are on the other side. Maybe, as Rosa had said one night, I didn’t like life.
Having slept with Marie-Lou, having paid for sex, had at least taught me one thing. When it came to love, I was all at sea. Each of the women I’d loved, from the first to the last, could have been the love of my life. But I hadn’t wanted it. This was why I was so pissed. At Marie-Lou, at myself, at women, and at the whole world.
Marie-Lou lived in a little studio apartment at the top of Rue Aubagne, just above the little metal bridge that goes over Cours Lieutaud and leads to Cours Julien, one of Marseilles’ hip new neighborhoods. That was where we’d staggered into another rai-ragga-reggae club, called the Degust’Mars C’et Ye, for a final drink. Marie-Lou told me that Bra, the owner, was an ex-junkie, who’d done time. The club was his dream. We’re at home here was written in big letters, surrounded by a mass of graffiti. The Degust’ claimed to be a place ‘where life flows by.’ What flowed was tequila. A final drink, one for the road, before making love. Looking deep in each other’s eyes, our bodies charged with electricity.
Walking down Rue d’Aubagne at any hour of the day was like going on a journey. The stores and restaurants were ports of call. Italy, Greece, Turkey, Lebanon, Madagascar, Reunion, Thailand, Vietnam, Africa, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria. Most important of all, Arax, which sells the best loukoum in Marseilles.
I didn’t feel up to going to the station house, picking up my car and heading home. I didn’t even want to go fishing. On Rue Longue-des-Capucins, the market was in full swing. Smells of coriander, cumin, curry, mint. The East. I turned right, through the Halle Delacroix, went into a bistro and ordered a double espresso and a few slices of bread and butter.
The newspapers led with the shootout at the Opéra. According to the journalists, the police had had Al Dakhil under surveillance ever since the Zucca slaying. Everyone had been expecting the score to be evened up. Obviously, it couldn’t stay at 1-0. Last night, acting quickly and coolly, Captain Auch’s squad had prevented the Place de l’Opéra from being transformed into a battlefield. No passers-by wounded, not even a broken pane of glass. Five gangsters dead. A good tally. Now everyone was waiting for the sequel.
I remembered Morvan crossing the square, and knocking with the flat of his hand on the parked taxi. I remembered Auch coming out of the Commanderie, with a smile on his face. Well, certainly with his hands in his pockets, I may have invented the smile. I wasn’t sure anymore.
The two gangsters who’d opened fire, Jean-Luc Trani and Pierre Bogho, were both wanted by the Paris police. But they were small fry. A bit of pimping, a bit of burglary. A few holdups, but nothing to put them in the top ten of the underworld hierarchy. Why should they hit a big shot like Al Dakhil? Someone must have ordered it, but who? That was the real question. But Auch was making no comment. That was his style: to say as little as possible.
After a second double espresso, I didn’t feel any better. I was really and truly hungover. But I forced myself to keep moving. I crossed the Canebière, and walked up Cours Belzunce, then Rue Colbert. On Avenue de la République, I took Montée des Folies-Bergère, in order to cut across the Panier. Rue de Lorette, Rue du Panier, Rue des Pistoles. A few moments later, I was rooting about in the lock of Lole’s apartment with my skeleton key. It was a bad lock, and didn’t resist for long. Neither did I. I went straight to the bedroom and collapsed on the bed. I was exhausted, my head full of dark thoughts. I didn’t want to think. I just wanted to sleep.
I’d fallen asleep again. When I woke, I was bathed in sweat. Behind the shutters, I could feel the heavy, dense heat. Two-twenty already. It was Saturday. Pérol was on duty until tomorrow evening. I only did one weekend a month. With Pérol there, I could sleep easy. He was the kind of cop who kept a cool head. And if anything went down, he could find me anywhere in Marseilles. I was more anxious when Cerutti replaced me. He was young and spoiling for a fight. He still had a lot to learn. I really needed to make a move. Tomorrow, like every Sunday, when I wasn’t on duty, Honorine was coming for a meal. I always made fish, and the rule was that the fish had to be freshly caught.
I took a cold shower, but it didn’t make me feel any better. I wandered naked through the apartment. Lole’s apartment. I still didn’t know why I’d come here. Lole had been like a magnet to Ugo, Manu and me. Not only for her beauty. She didn’t become beautiful until later. As a teenager, she was skinny, not much of a figure. Not like Zina or Kali, whose sex appeal was obvious.
It was our desire that made Lole beautiful. The desire she’d seen in us. It was what she had behind her eyes that had attracted us. That sense of some distant, unknown country from where she’d come and toward which she seemed to want to return. She was a gypsy, a traveler. She moved through space, and time seemed to have no effect on her. It was she who gave. The lovers she’d had, between Ugo and Manu, were chosen by her, as if she was the man. That was what made her inaccessible. Reaching out to her was like trying to embrace a ghost. All you were left with was the dust of eternity, the dust on a road that never ended. I knew that. Because our paths had crossed, just once. Almost by accident.
Zina had given me Lole’s number in Madrid, and I’d called her. To tell her about Manu, and to get her to come back. Even if we’d avoided seeing each other when Manu was around, there are some ties that can’t be broken. Ties of friendship, which are stronger and more real than family ties. It was up to me to tell Lole that Manu was dead. I wouldn’t have let anyone else do it. Especially not a cop.
I’d gone to meet her at the airport, then driven her to the morgue. To see him, one last time. We were the only ones to accompany him on his last journey. The only ones to love him. Three of his brothers came to the cemetery. Without their wives or children. Manu’s death was a relief to them. They were ashamed. We didn’t speak to each other.
After they left, Lole and I stayed by the grave. Dry-eyed, but with lumps in our throats. Manu was gone, and, with him, part of our youth. We left the cemetery and went to have a drink. A cognac. Then a second, and a third. We didn’t say a word. Surrounded by cigarette smoke.
“Do you want to eat something?”
I was trying to break the silence. She shrugged her shoulders and signaled to the waiter to serve us again.
“After that, we’ll go back,” she said, looking for approval in my eyes.
It was dark. After the rain of the last few days, an icy mistral was blowing. I went back with her to the little house Manu had rented in L’Estaque. I’d only been there once before. Almost three years ago, when Manu and I had had a violent quarrel. He was involved in smuggling stolen cars to Algeria. The net was closing in on the gang, and he’d be caught in the trap. I’d come to warn him. To tell him to get out while he could. We drank pastis in the little garden. He’d laughed.
“Fuck you, Fabio! Don’t meddle in this.”
“I took the trouble to come here, Manu.”
Lole watched us without saying a word. She was sipping her drink, and puffing slowly on her cigarette.
“Finish your drink, and get out. I’ve listened to enough of your bullshit, OK?”
I finished my drink, and stood up. He had that cynical smile of his. The one I remembered from the botched drugstore holdup and had never forgotten. And, behind his eyes, that despair that was uniquely his. Like a madness that would explain everything.
An Artaud look. He looked increasingly like Artaud since he’d shaved off his moustache.
“A long time ago, I called you a spic. That was the wrong word. What you are is a loser.”
Before he could react, I punched him in the face. He fell flat on his face in a scruffy rose bush. I walked up to him, calmly, coldly.
“Get up, loser.”
As soon as he was on his feet, I smashed my left fist into his stomach and followed it with a right to the chin. He fell back again into the roses. Lole had put out her cigarette. She came toward me.
“Get out of here! And never come back.”
I hadn’t forgotten those words. Now, outside her door, I’d left the engine running. Lole looked at me, then, without a word, got out of the car. I followed her. She went straight to the bathroom. I heard the water running. I poured myself a glass of whisky then lit a fire. She came back dressed in a yellow bathrobe. She picked up a glass and the whisky bottle, then dragged a foam mattress in front of the fireplace and sat down by the fire.
“You ought to take a shower,” she said without turning around. “Wash off the smell of death.”
We spent hours drinking. In the dark. Without talking. Putting more wood on the fire, playing records. Paco de Lucia. Sabicas. Django. Then Billie Holiday, the complete edition. Lole had huddled up against me. Her body felt hot. She was shaking.
We reached the end of night. The hour when demons dance. The fire was crackling. I’d spent years dreaming of Lole’s body. Pleasure at my fingertips. Her cries made my blood freeze. Thousands of knives stabbing my body. I turned to the fire. I lit two cigarettes and handed her one.
“How do you feel?” she asked.
“Like hell. How about you?”
I stood up and put my pants on. I felt her eyes on me while I dressed. For a moment, I saw her smile. It was a weary smile, but not a sad one.
“The whole thing stinks,” I said.
She stood up and walked toward me. Naked and unashamed. Tenderly, she placed her hand on my chest. Her fingers were burning hot. I felt as if she was branding me. For life.
“What are you going to do now?”
I didn’t have an answer to her question. I didn’t have the answer to her question.
“The things a cop can do.”
“Is that all?”
“It’s all I can do.”
“You can do more, if you want. Like fuck me.”
“Is that why you did this?”
I didn’t see the slap coming. She’d put her heart and soul in it.
“I don’t barter or exchange. I don’t blackmail, and I don’t haggle. You can take me or leave me. Yes, go ahead, say it, the whole thing stinks.”
She opened the door, her eyes still fixed on mine. I felt like an idiot. I was really ashamed of myself. I had a last vision of her body, her beauty. I knew how much I was going to lose as soon as the door slammed behind me.
“Get out of here!”
It was the second time she’d chased me away.
I was on the bed, leafing through a book I’d found on top of a pile of books and brochures under the bed. Grand Suitcase Hotel by Christian Dotremont, an author I didn’t know.
Lole had highlighted a few phrases and a few poems in yellow:
At your window sometimes I do not knock
to your voice I do not reply
to your gesture I do not respond
in order to deal only
with the immovable sea.
I suddenly felt like an intruder. I put the book away, timidly. I had to go. I took a last look at the bedroom, then the living room. I couldn’t figure it out. Everything was tidy. The ashtrays were clean, the kitchen things had been put away. It was as if Lole was coming back any minute now. Or as if she’d left forever, free at last of the burden of nostalgia cluttering her life: books, photos, ornaments, record albums. But where was she? Since I had no answer to that, I watered the basil and the mint. I did it tenderly. Because I loved the way they smelled. And because I loved Lole.
There were three keys hanging from a nail. I tried them. The keys to the door, and the letter box, I supposed. I closed the door and put the keys in my pocket.
I passed Pierre Puget’s unfinished masterpiece, the Vieille Charité. In the nineteenth century it had sheltered plague victims, at the beginning of the twentieth the destitute, and then, after the Germans ordered the area to be destroyed, all the people who’d been thrown out of their homes. It had seen a lot of misery. Now it was brand new, and looked magnificent, its lines accentuated by the pink stone. The buildings housed several museums, and the big chapel had become an exhibition space. There was a library, and even a tea room and restaurant. Every intellectual and artist Marseilles could muster put in an appearance there, almost as regularly as I went fishing.
There was a show of work by César, the Marseilles genius who’d made a fortune out of compressing pieces of scrap. Most people in Marseilles thought that was funny, but I just wanted to throw up. Tourists were flooding in, by the busload. Italians, Spanish, English, Germans. And Japanese, of course. So much bad taste in a place with such a painful history seemed to me a symbol of the end of the century.
Parisian bullshit had reached Marseilles. The city dreamed of being a capital. The capital of the South. Forgetting that what made it a capital was the fact that it was a port. A place where every race on earth mixed, and had done for centuries, ever since Protis had set foot on the shore and married the beautiful Ligurian princess Gyptis.
Djamel was coming along Rue Rodillat. He froze when he saw me, a look of surprise on his face. But he couldn’t do anything except continue in my direction. Desperately hoping, I suppose, that I wouldn’t recognize him.
“How are things, Djamel?”
“Fine, monsieur,” he said, half-heartedly.
He looked around. I knew that, for him, just to be seen talking to a cop was shame enough. I took his arm. “Come on, I’ll buy you a drink.”
With my chin, I indicated the Bar des Treize-Coins, a bit farther along. The place I hung out. The police station was just over five hundred yards away, at the bottom of Passage des Treize-Coins, on the other side of Rue Sainte-Françoise. I was the only cop to come here. The others had their regular haunts farther down, either on Rue de l’Evêché or on Place des Trois-Cantons.
Despite the heat, we sat down inside, so as not to be seen. Ange, the owner, brought us two draft beers.
“So, what about the moped? Did you put it in a safe place?”
“Yes, monsieur. Just like you said.” He drank some of his beer, then gave me a sidelong look. “Listen, monsieur. They already asked me a whole lotta questions. Do I have to start all over again?”
It was my turn to be surprised. “Who did?”
“You’re a cop, ain’t you?”
“Did I ask you any questions?”
“The others.”
“What others?”
“The others. You know. The ones who gunned him down. They really put the heat on me. They told me they could take me in as an accessory to murder. Because of the moped. Did he really whack a guy?”
I felt a hot flash. So they knew. I drank, with my eyes closed. I didn’t want Djamel to see how agitated I was. The sweat streamed over my forehead and cheeks and down my neck. They knew. Just the thought of it gave me the shivers.
“Who was the guy?”
I opened my eyes. I ordered another beer. My mouth felt dry. I wanted to tell Djamel the whole story. Manu, Ugo and me. The story of three buddies. But whatever way I told him the story, he’d only remember Manu and Ugo. Not the cop. The cop represented everything that made him throw up. Injustice personified.
I piss on you and your police machine
Brainless sons of whores
Upholders of the laws
That was a lyric by NTM,
a rap band from Saint-Denis. A big hit in the suburbs, among fifteen- to eighteen-year-olds, despite being boycotted by most radio stations. Hatred of the cops was the one thing that united the kids. True, we didn’t help them have a very exalted image of us. I should know. And the words ‘friendly cop’ weren’t written on my forehead. Anyhow, I wasn’t a friendly cop. I believed in justice, the law, things like that. Things that no one respected, because we were the first to ignore them.
“A gangster,” I said.
Dajamel didn’t give a fuck about my answer. It was the only kind of answer a cop could give. He hadn’t expected me to say, “He was a good guy, and besides, he was my buddy.” But maybe that’s what I should have said. Maybe. But I’d stopped knowing what to answer kids like him, kids like the ones I met in the projects. Sons of immigrants, without jobs, without futures, without hope.
They had only to switch on the TV news to realize that their fathers had been fucked over and that they themselves were going to fucked over even worse. Driss had told me about a friend of his named Hassan who’d gone straight to the bank, overjoyed, the day he’d received his first wages. He finally felt respectable, even on a minimum wage. “I’d like a loan of 30,000 francs, monsieur. To buy a car.” The bank people had laughed in his face. That day, he’d understood it all. Djamel already knew it. And in his eyes, it was Manu, Ugo and me that I saw. Thirty years before.
“Can I take the moped out again?”
“If you want my advice, you should get rid of it. ”
“The others told me it was no problem.” He gave me another surreptitious look. “I didn’t tell them you’d asked me to do the same.”
“The same what?”
“You know. To hide it.”
The telephone rang. From the counter, Ange signaled to me.
Total Chaos Page 8