The Godmother

by Cayre, Hannelore; Smee, Stephanie;

  That evening, I didn’t weep on my couch. I even invited my two girls over for dinner and made them what my mother used to call her culinary speciality: Girls, with this recipe, you’ll be alright, whatever the circumstances.

  Miami salad

  One tin of palm hearts, one tin of corn and one tin of sliced pineapple.

  One avocado

  Dice the ingredients.

  Put everything into a salad bowl.

  Add some peeled defrosted shrimps.

  For the cocktail sauce: stir together some Heinz ketchup and Amora mayonnaise until it’s salmon-pink.

  It would be an exaggeration to say that we became friends that day, Khadija and I, but she was so kind, so patient with the old people and their families, that she allowed me to get past my internal guilt about not doing anything useful. I followed her advice and spaced out my visits.

  But towards the end of June, things got more complicated.

  For a couple of months I had been fairly vague in my translations about the quantities being imported by her son, Afid.

  In the first wire taps, he had been bringing in 50 kilos per trip in his little vegetable truck, like an unassuming ant; then it was 60, then 70… At some point, I stopped translating, allowing the specific details to go unremarked, and making the note indecipherable in my reports, on the very rare occasions when the quantity was mentioned. In April, they were talking 250 kilos and by May they had acquired a bigger truck.

  I was only given the conversations with some Arabic to translate, but I knew that the drug squad detectives were listening to the wholesalers who were chatting amongst themselves and with their customers in French. Afid’s mates were all very suspicious and limited themselves to announcing fresh delivery by SMS, and nothing more. I guess they weren’t sure of the exact quantities before they took delivery.

  The Benabdelaziz family had invested in a second-hand Crompton at the end of April, a semi-inflatable, flat-bottomed motor boat that would take them across the Spanish border by sea, with the new truck being permanently parked at Ceuta.

  I made sure to mention this detail of the new boat in my transcripts, since the whole world, both in Morocco and France, was talking of nothing but the purchase and the mad rides – their words – they’d all be able to go on, out on the water in summer, even if Afid did dampen their enthusiasm each time by pointing out that the vessel was intended for work purposes.

  Afid was planning a crossing in July, and this time he wouldn’t be alone, but accompanied by one of his uncle’s employees. A team of aquadores, specialising in the unloading of drugs, would be waiting for him on the beach at Calamocarro at Ceuta, their job being to secure the landing location and move the drugs as efficiently as possible to the false-bottomed truck.

  Given all these reinforcements, the drug squad was anticipating a significantly larger quantity than normal.

  Out of curiosity, I had watched a YouTube clip about how these disembarkations were managed. You could see this new breed of beach ‘attendants’ shifting the cargo in broad daylight and with complete impunity smack in the middle of swimmers who were filming it all on their mobile phones.

  Once the drugs were in the truck, the two men were planning to take it to a warehouse located near Vitry, not in a Go Fast convoy with other vehicles, but on their own, discreetly, driving at a grandfatherly pace in their vegetable lorry. Waiting at Vitry would be their three usual mates, plus two other wholesalers with their vehicle. On the return journey, Afid intended to use the truck to pick up his mother and sister and take them back to the bled for the summer holidays.

  Sensing a big catch, the police had decided to arrest them in the act – just, as they put it, so they could stamp on those piss ants before heading off themselves for a holiday in the sun.

  At this point the utter absurdity of my situation sank in. Here I was blithely falsifying telephone intercepts – whether out of sheer bloody-mindedness or a desire to please the mother of the drug trafficker who had not, in fact, asked me to do any such thing – while in some parking lot at Vitry they were going to uncover I don’t know how much superior quality, so-called olive hash selling for up to 5,000 euros a kilo.

  The departure from Spain was fixed for the evening of 13th July so they could get to France on the 14th, the national holiday, and head up to Paris with non-existent surveillance given the massive mobilisation of security forces that happened every year on that day under France’s Vigipirate anti-terror alert system.

  At this stage of the investigation, there was no more translating at my place. I was summoned into police headquarters at Quai des Orfèvres on the 13th at around 10pm and told to stay until the truck got to Poitiers in the afternoon of the 14th. Then, at around 4pm, with everything on track, I was allowed to go home, take a shower, and sleep a few hours so I would be ready to translate the questioning of the Moroccan driver.

  In a state of panic, I ran to the nursing home.

  I found Khadija and dragged her into the plant room, where I briefly told her, in Arabic, who I really was, what I had done and what I knew. I urged her to call her son, who should have made it to Orleans or thereabouts by then, bearing in mind when I had left the squad’s offices.

  She looked at me, aghast, but didn’t say a single word to interrupt me. When I had finished, she did what I said and set out the situation for him in splendid summary and with a magnificent sense of composure.

  ‘Be quiet and listen: there’s a lady standing in front of me who speaks Arabic and who’s saying you have to get off the motorway and hide the little fish somewhere. After that you have to get back on the motorway and you can’t warn the others, because otherwise they’re going to dig around and they’ll know it’s me and the lady who warned you. They’re waiting for you at Vitry. Please, don’t resist.’

  Meanwhile I had the A-10 up on my mobile.

  ‘Ask him which is the next motorway exit.’

  ‘The lady’s asking which exit you’re at exactly.’

  ‘I’ve got the 14 – Orleans North coming up.’

  ‘Tell him to throw his phone out the window immediately and only get off at exit 12, otherwise they’ll pinpoint him by the coordinates. The Saint-Arnoult toll booth is at exit 11 and the police have stationed two surveillance vehicles there.’

  ‘You’ve got to throw your phone out right now and then take exit 12 to hide the fish, you hear me? Exit 12! After that you won’t be able to get off.’

  ‘Bye, Mum,’ he said to his mother, hanging up.

  Khadija stared at me, eyes wide with fear, then burst into tears.

  I had a lump in my throat.

  I held her tightly in my arms and we sat down to wait, huddled up against each other, holding our breath, eyes and ears directed towards the door, our minds even further away, alongside the police who were waiting for Afid.

  At some point, I finally stood up and went to visit my mother.

  Afid obeyed and was arrested as expected when he reached the five wholesalers who were still waiting for him patiently at Vitry, despite the fact he was grossly late. Needless to say, the officers found only an empty hiding place – presumably identified by Platoon and Laser, the two Belgian Shepherds from the dog squad, who must have barked like the possessed.

  At around 7 o’clock in the evening, I was summoned to translate the interview of the courier from the village, who only spoke Moroccan dialect. I went in, my spirit light, with no sense of culpability or dread, but rather, I’d say, with a sense of cheerful detachment.

  When I arrived at the drug squad offices, I found the usual hive of activity. Detectives who hadn’t slept for 48 hours were frenetically going from one room to another with statements from the most forthcoming interviewees, which were then used to confuse the most reticent. Apart from Afid, the courier and the five wholesalers who were waiting for the merchandise, the police had arrested a dozen collaterals – girl-friends, parents and a few dealers, each of whom was being cooked in a separate room. Khadija hadn�
�t yet been questioned, but it would only be a matter of hours because she would soon finish her shift and they were waiting for her outside her apartment block.

  Young men, all of Arabic background, were coming in and going out in handcuffs. I didn’t know which one was the famous Afid until a detective pointed me out, shouting the interpreter’s here! at the top of his voice, and a boy waiting his turn for a medical check turned to stare at me. I flushed red as a beetroot.

  *

  I translated the courier’s interrogation. From his pithy responses to the questions put to him by the detective: I don’t know what drugs you’re talking about… if you say so… etc., I quickly realised that none of the interviewees would be giving up any information to speak of.

  Since they had not actually found any drugs, the cops had been pretty vague about the quantity involved, though they were estimating it to be in the order of half a tonne. They weren’t at all happy that all this had disappeared into thin air, even if the phone taps, baffling as they were, were enough for them to send everybody to prison.

  To the question Why did you get off the motorway so quickly and what did you do between Orleans and the Saint-Arnoult toll booth for more than two hours? the Moroccan had replied that he was driving the truck up with Afid so they could sell it. They were supposed to be paid on delivery, but they were worried because the engine was making a strange noise. They’d spent a good two hours fixing it before returning to the motorway, where they had floored it so they wouldn’t arrive late to the place where they were meeting the purchaser. And the stash? What stash? Was there a stash? Oh, I didn’t know!

  I could see the two detectives felt like hitting him, but what they might, not so long ago, have allowed themselves to do, they no longer did in the presence of my respectable fifty-year-old self. So they just stood there, harbouring death in their soul.

  And if I had been asked to translate the call between Khadija and her son before he reached the Saint-Arnoult toll booth, I would have written what I always wrote: Conversation not relevant to current investigation, and naturally they would have believed me. But nobody asked me anything.

  I remember going back to my place feeling completely washed out.

  I undressed and stood in front of my bathroom mirror to take out my contacts, and when I looked at myself I was shocked by the stony face staring back at me.

  Khadija had been right when she said I was angry. It would have been no exaggeration to say that anger was flooding out of my body, like water from a sewer after a storm. I considered myself closely. My breasts, my thighs, my arms… all a lost cause. My whole body was crying out for help. I had to face facts: I was getting old.

  What was to become of me, the woman with no pension, no social security? I had nothing but my waning strength. Not a cent put aside, my meagre savings swallowed up by my mother’s drawn-out death at Les Eoliades. I pictured myself rotting, once I was no longer able to work, with nobody to care for me, in my apartment block populated by Chinese, kept awake by their unbearable shouting. Ever since their arrival, the members of the tentacular Fò family had simply looked right through me as if through a window pane, but as soon as they realised I was no longer paying my building and administrative fees, I would instantly lose my cloak of invisibility and be sent off to croak on a street corner like a pigeon.

  That’s what I told myself as I looked in the mirror that evening.

  This ultra-realist vision of my future destiny filled me with such despair that I was moved to apply some make up, spray myself with perfume and slip into my pretty apricot-compote-coloured dress. Not for anybody in particular. Just for me. And as I was trying to make myself feel better in front of my mirror, I heard explosions. It was only at the third explosion that I realised it wasn’t an attack, but the 14th of July fireworks, which I had completely forgotten.

  I dragged myself up the stairs, two at a time, to the top floor of my building. A young Chinese couple had already opened the fire escape and were cuddling up to watch the fireworks. I went to the far side of the roof top to enjoy my trip all on my own. The widow Portefeux. The odd sock.

  I lay down on my back, my arms spreadeagled, and there beneath the sprays of colour, waves of pleasure washed over me as I offered my body up to the heavens.

  *

  Back in my flat, I went to bed but I couldn’t get to sleep, tossing and turning feverishly under my sheets, my head full of all that had just happened.

  For almost twenty-five years, I had been clinging to a piece of driftwood in the tempest of this lousy existence of mine, all the while waiting for some unexpected plot development worthy of a television series… A war, a win in the lottery, the ten plagues of Egypt, whatever… And now at last it was happening!

  As I looked at the portrait of me next to Audrey Hepburn, I told myself that my plan of collecting fireworks had shown some damned ambition… Fireworks were set off only against summer skies, so following them around the world would mean living an endless summer – like some cosmic surfer carried by an enormous global wave. Sydney at New Year’s, then Hong Kong, Dubai, Taipei, Rio, Cannes, Geneva – and to finish, the biggest, most dazzling display in the world: Manila. Fireworks launching from one hundred different points at once, the city transformed into some extra-terrestrial battlefield…

  A life plan as gratifying as that vision of the little girl with the Patience-blue eyes in front of her huge ice cream.

  And somewhere in the vicinity of exit 12 on the A-10, out in the country, there was an enormous quantity of hash that was just asking to be recovered.

  I had not had much of an internal struggle before sticking my nose into the Benabdelaziz family’s affairs. No struggle at all, truth be told. I’d even go so far as to say I had acted on instinct or, more precisely, from some kind of deep-rooted, ancestral drive.

  And as for any sense of guilt, there was none – absolutely none!

  From the first day of my professional life, I had understood that there was no logical point to my work.

  Fourteen million cannabis users in France and eight hundred thousand growers living off that crop in Morocco. The two countries are friendly, and yet those kids whose haggling I listened to all day long were serving heavy prison sentences for having sold their hash to the kids of the cops who were prosecuting them and of the judges who were sentencing them, not to mention to all the lawyers who were defending them. It didn’t take long for them to become bitter and poisoned with hate. I can only think, though – even if my cop boyfriend insists I’m wrong – that this excess of resources, this furious determination to drain the sea of hash inundating France, teaspoon by teaspoon, is above all else a tool for monitoring the population insofar as it allows identity checks to be carried out on Arabs and blacks ten times a day.

  Regardless, drug trafficking had provided me with a living for almost twenty-five years just as it had the thousands of civil servants charged with its eradication, along with the numerous families who, without that money, would be relying on social security to feed themselves.

  Even in the United States, when it came to decriminalisation, they were less idiotic than we were, and that’s saying something. Over there, they were emptying the prisons to make room for real criminals.

  Zero tolerance, zero thought – that about sums up the drug policy in this country, which is supposed to be governed by people who came top of their class. But fortunately, we have our terroir, the sacred, wine-producing soil of France. At least we’re allowed to be plastered from morning to night. Too bad for the Muslims, but then all they have to do is hit the booze like everybody else if they too want to work on their inner beauty.

  And I was meant to be feeling guilty? What a joke!

  The woman who had been scarred on life’s battlefield was finally hauling herself out of her mental inertia. I’m done with hoping; now I want! as Randal declared, the hero from my dad’s favourite book, The Thief of Paris by Georges Darien. We’d always worked with Arabs in my family, so it might as
well continue. It seemed stunningly obvious.

  So, in my newly awoken state, I returned to the daily grind of work – nursing home – work… A few translations in a procuring case: some girls who’d been brought over from the bled by some guys promising them they’d be footballers’ whores… The inevitable shoulder-surfing credit card scammers memorising people’s PIN and then knocking off their card: this gang were all from Boufarik in Algeria and had provided me – and themselves – with ten years of guaranteed income… A dope-dealing charge involving three charmless and spectacularly brainless Moroccans who swore onthequranofmecca every second breath… And finally, Khadija, whose phone had once again been tapped by the investigating magistrate.

  Then, three days later, on 18 July, my mother had her second stroke.

  The carers noticed that her brain had shrunk overnight to the size of a peach stone. She could no longer swallow at all, nor speak a word of French, and she just kept on screaming, terrified. Management had sent her for a scan which had confirmed their diagnosis: whatever remained of her right cerebral hemisphere was totally shot and the left side was swimming in blood.

  When I went to Les Eoliades to ascertain the extent of the disaster, Khadija had returned to work and was sitting waiting for me on my mother’s bed.

  ‘I wanted to thank you,’ she said.

  Her scarf contrasted sharply with the pallor of her face, ravaged by a week without sleep, giving her an air of profound tragedy.

  I reassured her in Arabic: ‘It was inconceivable that I do nothing when I’ve been listening to you speak with your son every day. Do you have any news?’

  ‘Yes, his lawyer has told me he’s doing well and has asked me for lots of money.’