The Godmother

by Cayre, Hannelore; Smee, Stephanie;

  ‘Isn’t he yours?’

  ‘No, the dogs belong to the unit, but once they’re nine years old they retire.’

  ‘And what do they do then?’

  ‘If nobody takes them, they’re put down.’

  All of a sudden, standing there with my fluffy fox terrier under my arm, I was blinded by a shaft of brilliant light. An epiphany in canine form!

  ‘I’ll take him right now!’

  ‘I told you, he still has one year to go. But if you want to do a good deed, there’s a special refuge for police dogs. You can find it on the internet, on the squad’s website.’

  ‘And can you choose… according to their speciality?’

  ‘Their past record is written up under their photo. So, for example, if you have kids, they’ll never give you a patrol dog because of its bite.’

  ‘And are they all big like Laser, or are there smaller ones?’

  ‘Generally speaking, they’re Belgian Malinois. Look, I’ll show you.’

  He got out his iPhone and began to scroll through pictures of dogs in cages waiting to be put down.

  I wasn’t feeling too great as it was… but seeing all those poor creatures looking pleadingly at the lens, well, the dam wall gave way. I couldn’t hold back the tears any longer. I was pretty much howling.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ said the cop, totally embarrassed.

  ‘No, no, let’s keep looking,’ I said, sniffling, ‘I’m feeling a bit on edge at the moment. I’d like to see the drug squad dogs, like Laser. They’re the most gentle, I’m sure!’

  ‘That one, there, Centaur… Explosives detection.’

  ‘No, no, drugs!’ I insisted, between hiccups. I was behaving like a lunatic.

  ‘DNA… that’s one ugly-looking mutt! Looks like a kangaroo! DNA, 9 years old, drugs and currency detection…’

  It was true, he had a challenging appearance, with his black-and-white-flecked coat, his handle-bar ears and his legs that were too long for his sausage-shaped body. A total mongrel mix of Belgian Malinois, greyhound and some other unidentifiable breed.

  But DNA was smiling in the photo, an enthusiastic smile, full of confidence in his future owner.

  ‘Call them, please, maybe they’ve already killed him or he’s about to die this evening!’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Yes, yes, I want to adopt that smiling dog. Call them. Now! Tell them I’ll come by before they close to collect DNA.’

  The poor man took a step backwards, alarmed by my crazed look.

  ‘Listen. My mother is going to die sometime in the next few days. She was taken to a palliative care unit two hours ago for deep sedation. I suspect that means something to you, seeing as you’re an animal lover. I’ve had to put two down so I know what’s involved. They look at you when you put them to sleep and they struggle to keep their eyes from closing. And do you know why they do that? So they can take an image of you with them because they love you so much and they know they’re not going to see you anymore. Because dogs, you see, they don’t believe in God. Dogs are intelligent, not like people… My mother won’t even have it as good as a dog does. They’ll let her die of hunger – naturally, as they say in this backwards country – and I won’t be there to hold her hand because it’s just too horrible. So, I have to adopt DNA this evening because if I don’t, he’s going to die, too, and that… that’s just not possible. Call them. Please.’

  He called.

  We went there together and, by the end of that day, 23 July, DNA was home with me.

  I loved everything about him: his harlequin coat, the lack of proportion in his body shape which rivalled only mine, his resonant barks that finally drowned out the racket made by my neighbours, and the fact that he instantly decided to attach himself to my feet wherever I went, like a shadow in the shape of a dog.

  And my mother completely disappeared from my thoughts.

  The moment DNA set foot in my door I had so many things to tell him that I didn’t stop talking; it’s just that when you haven’t had anybody you could really chat to for twenty-five years, there’s no shortage of conversation topics.

  Plus, we had a job to do as a matter of urgency:

  ‘We’re going to take a look on Google Earth to see where that Moroccan idiot could have stashed his load. Yes we are, yes we are, yes we are…’

  He stared at me with his moist eyes. Woof, he agreed.

  Exit 12 on the Janville-Allaine stretch of the A10.

  I spent three hours clicking through Street View, which I’ve had a lot of practice at, seeing as I almost never go on holidays except while seated at my desk on the computer.

  I started on the right-hand side of the motorway, which seemed more obvious to me if you were coming from the south.

  I imagined Afid panicking, looking for a place to offload the stash, bearing in mind that he had neither the time nor a shovel to dig a hole, and that he was looking for somewhere that would be sheltered from the rain, not knowing when somebody would be able to come and remove his precious cargo. At each junction, I swivelled the arrow through 360 degrees as if looking around. I couldn’t see any place where you could discreetly hide a significant quantity of drugs.

  For a start, we were in the Beauce region, and the Beauce is as flat as a tack. It’s so flat you can spot a single person standing up from a thousand miles around. Anywhere near houses was an impossibility – people are so bored to death in these places that just the sound of a truck is enough to bring them to their windows. All there was within a five-kilometre radius were fields as far as the eye could see, working farms or villages. I didn’t find anything except a construction supplies warehouse on the D1183 which was totally fenced off, a tall building housing electricity meters, and a small wooded area. On the D118, there were two other little woods sheltered from view. Nothing else. Even if he’d gone further, he would have ended up turning around because he wouldn’t have found anything more than I could see. Apart from those few places, everything else was exposed.

  The next day then, in crushing heat and feeling overly optimistic, my dog and I set off on a real life expedition.

  We started at the warehouse, which we approached from behind along a small road. It looked like some type of quarry; the setting for a murder where you expect at any moment to come across a woman spread-eagled on her stomach, her skirt rucked up, her face half submerged in a puddle of water. I let DNA off the lead. Apart from chasing a rabbit, he did nothing but follow me around wagging his tail. We stayed until very late, also exploring all the little surrounding woods, stands of a hundred or so trees clustered around narrow, muddy streams.

  As my pretty grey suede shoes disappeared with a sucking noise into the spongy soil, I felt the first twinges of doubt. When I collapsed to the ground after my foot caught in a tree root, I started to curse the world.

  I had already wasted four days since Khadija’s death; the chances of finding myself face to face with the police or a gang of dealers was increasing with every hour.

  What the fuck was I doing there? What if my dog was a dud? Or if Afid was dumber than I thought and had just randomly thrown the drugs into a ditch?

  Looking back, I can see that I must have been pretty bloody desperate to have hatched this plan; a bit like the mad woman who buys a lottery ticket in the hope of escaping the bailiffs.

  With a little effort, I could at least eliminate one variable: the state of my dog’s sense of smell.

  Before going home at around two in the morning, we stopped to do a pee at Rue Envierges in the 20th, a street known to be an open-air dope market. No sooner had I opened the car door than DNA shot out like an arrow to go and stick his snout right into the crotch of some black dealer who leaped, terrorised, onto a car bonnet. I whistled. The dog came back to me immediately and we left. So, no problems on that front anyway.

  After a few hours’ sleep, I drove back to the Beauce, this time adopting a different approach. I went hurtling off the freeway, mimicking Afid’s panic, turni
ng at every intersection towards where it seemed from a distance that it might be possible to hide some drugs. I did that four times, each time letting the dog off the leash when I had a good feeling about a place. At one point, we came to a road linking the villages of Janville and Allainville; a lane crossing through a field, lined with huge wind turbines and flanking the A10. In the distance I saw an industrial zone with stacks of pipes and huge piles of gravel and drums. Looking at my iPhone, I realised why I hadn’t noticed it on Google Earth – the place where I now was had been hidden by a small cloud just as the satellite had taken the image.

  DNA leaped out of the car barking like a lunatic and started indicating the drums and piles of gravel. I saw that the plants bordering the edge of the area were shrivelling up, as if someone had emptied the toxic contents of the barrels over them. Using the handle of my hairbrush as a lever, I popped the cover off one of the drums and… there was the hash, in the form of so-called ‘Moroccan bags’, giant bricks wrapped in plastic packages with handles. Each one weighing twenty kilos, enough to tear your arm off.

  The first barrel I opened had two of them. I tapped the others with a stick, and established they were all full. But there were also one kilo packets of hash hidden under a pile of gravel…

  Suddenly I was struck with a sense of my utter recklessness. At a rough guess, there were millions of euros worth of cannabis at the foot of that wind turbine. Every single one of the Benabdelazizes was at risk of being tortured to death for the purpose of producing cute videos aimed at making Afid say where he had stashed the drugs. The police must be holding him in solitary, him and his driver, so that they, the cops, would have a chance of getting there first, otherwise queues would already be forming in this neck of the woods.

  For a moment I’d been scared that Afid’s sister would go digging through the register of Les Eoliades to find my details… But frankly, I had nothing to worry about: if she had even a shred of survival instinct, after the death of her mother she would be hiding in a deep hole somewhere on the outskirts of the bled. The only person who might suspect me was Afid himself, and he was in prison.

  I started to panic again as I shoved as much as I could into the boot of my car: to be precise, three Moroccan bags and two Ikea bags filled to bursting with bricks of hash.

  Once I was back on the motorway, I relaxed. To my surprise, I even started singing at the top of my lungs – I am a Go Fast, just me, all by myself, to the tune of Renaud’s song Bande de jeunes – without realising I was totally stoned. The bricks stank so much despite their cellophane wrapping that when I got back to Paris it was as if I had smoked ten joints. Poor DNA was looking pretty funny too. He was asleep on his back, dribbling litres of drool, the smell of cannabis wafting through to him in his sleep and irritating his nose.

  I parked the car in my spot and brought the cannabis – over a hundred kilos of it – up to my apartment as quickly as I could. Then I hired a van and left immediately to go and load up the rest.

  I thanked the heavens above that both my girls were on holiday abroad. I also said a prayer of thanks to my disreputable Chinese neighbours, who got up to God knows what sort of funny business – and had even transformed the building’s basement at vast expense into a strong room so that they, too, could move between their cellars and their apartments with enormous plastic canvas carry bags. I had actually voted against the works, though I knew it would be purely a matter of form seeing as the Fò family had bought out the entire building. And finally – for the first time – I was grateful for my peasant’s constitution. As I scurried along, loaded up on each side with bags weighing twenty kilos, I could feel in my body the generations of indefatigable women who had dragged their kids and their swedes from shtetl to shtetl.

  I was very careful at the wind turbine to put everything back the way it had been and to remove any trace of having been there… But then, just as I was turning off the lane and back onto the regional, I saw a convoy of 4x4s appearing out of a cloud of dust and approaching from the other direction. My heart stopped beating for three kilometres at least, until I reached the motorway in one piece.

  If I’d left just three minutes later, I’d have been dead and nobody would have had a clue as to why the hell my corpse was even there. The presence of my body in a field in the middle of the Beauce would have been as inexplicable as that of the mythical scuba diver dropped by a Canadair water bomber into a forest fire.

  My cellar was stuffed full of my parents’ furniture, so I had no choice but to store the hash in my apartment, where you could no longer move without tripping over it. You couldn’t breathe either, with the oily, universally recognisable smell of resin pervading the entire place.

  I closed the windows and sealed the gap below the front door with my stuffed dachshund draught-excluder, but the smell continued to seep into the stairwell, waging a fratricidal battle with the smell of fish sauce coming from my neighbours. So out I had to go again, this time to buy fifty or so airtight containers. All this on no sleep for the previous 48 hours, and with my back killing me.

  In the end, I called two traveller types who came with their clapped-out truck to empty my cellar of the medieval crap which I still had from my parents. While they were busy loading their vehicle with marvels such as the famous helmet-turned-lamp as well as a series of tapestries depicting the Siege of Orleans and some furniture à la Spanish Inquisition – which they seemed to find unfathomably beautiful – I surreptitiously removed my father’s short-barrelled .357 Magnum.

  I had been planning to get rid of that revolver – not only because I find weapons hideously ugly, but because this particular one had killed people whose bodies had been buried on The Estate. After all, if one day somebody stumbled upon those remains, it would inevitably lead back to me; and then if they were to find the weapon that had been used to bump off all those people, I would find myself having to offer all sorts of exhausting explanations. But getting rid of a gun is the sort of job you never get around to doing, always putting it off to tomorrow.

  On that memorable day, when I emptied my cellar so I could use it to store my hash, I finally decided to keep it.

  With the cold weight of the metal in my hand, I thought about how you never remember what you felt about the events you witnessed as a child, almost as if they were made-up stories that had happened to somebody else.

  One image comes back to me often: of my father, standing motionless for several long minutes in the middle of the lawn. To the untrained eye, he was merely admiring his garden. His cauliflower-sized roses that neither I nor my mother were allowed to cut. His irises every colour of the rainbow. The wisteria that climbed all over his bench; his hedges trimmed into round balls; his pyramid-shaped yews… But that wasn’t at all what he was looking at; he was occupied by something much further removed in time and space – the valley of the Medjerda river where he had grown up.

  It had driven him crazy to be torn from his roots without having a chance to fight for his Tunisian farm.

  There in the middle of The Estate, under a weeping willow, he had installed a reproduction of one of Emile Boisseau’s allegorical sculptures, Defence of the Home. For those who don’t know, it’s a sculpture in the art pompier tradition dating from 1887, the original of which stands in the Square d’Ajaccio in the 7th arrondissement of Paris. It was reproduced in a series of different metals, and we had the cheap version in zinc and antimony at our place.

  No work of art better expressed the mental image my father had of himself. Just like the valorous Gaul clad in a simple fur skin, protecting his wife and infant with his broken sword, he would die defending his family and The Estate, weapons in hand. Perit sed in armis.

  When night fell, the tall streetlights along the motorway illuminated the garden like an Expressionist film set – especially when the elongated silhouette of a burglar could be seen slipping through the rustling shadows cast by the tall trees. On two occasions, I saw somebody scale the wall, make their way around the house
and, after seeing that the place was both occupied and impregnable, leave again the same way they had arrived.

  But one time, in the middle of the night, one of these miscreants went a step too far, carrying off Defence of the Home after crudely knocking it from its plinth with a chisel.

  The next day, unable to bear this wound to his narcissism, my father bought the notorious .357 Magnum from one of his spook friends, complete with silencer so he could shoot intruders without waking us up. He killed the first one when I was eight years old, and buried him at the bottom of the garden, in the place where we burned the dead leaves in autumn. I remember firing a few questions at my father that day, having spotted him crossing the lawn at high speed with a body falling over the edge of a wheelbarrow. He replied that if these guys didn’t want to be shot, all they had to do was not break into The Estate after nightfall – because he had the law on his side. It was called legitimate self-defence. And anyway, no colonial settler who ever lived in a house surrounded by walls would behave any differently.

  I don’t know how many he killed in all, because generally it happened at night, and at a time in my life when I wasn’t paying too much attention to things, but I do know there’s a veritable mass grave down there in the leaf-covered pit. It was our poor manservant who assumed the onerous task of burying the bodies – he told me himself one day, after asking me to come with him to the pharmacy to buy a girdle for his back. What’s more, my father must have lent his pit to others or used it for activities related to Mondiale, because when I cleared out the house after he’d died, I found twenty odd identity cards in a shoe box. All men aged between twenty and forty years old. I put them in an envelope addressed to the local police station which produced not the slightest consequence, not even a brief article in the newspapers.

  During the time my parents lived there, The Estate was like a giant clam whose shell, from time to time, would close over some nameless fish in the silence of the ocean.