The Godmother

by Cayre, Hannelore; Smee, Stephanie;

  The key to drug-dealing is consistency. You have to guarantee an uninterrupted supply of the product at all costs because the customer is fickle and always in a hurry. If a dealer can’t supply anymore, within a week, the good-will value of his book of phone numbers plummets – we’re talking here about thousands of euros. A shortage of product is the dealer’s chronic sickness. It’s a bit like in the singing business: lots of talented performers, and barely any decent stuff to sing. To make sure you have work, ideally you want to write, compose and sing – to plant, transport and sell.

  So, you can understand the distress of the cretin-in-chief known as Scotch who’s got nothing left in the shop except cannabis that’s going to be shoved right back in his face – and at the height of summer, what’s more, when everybody’s heading to the beaches with something to smoke in their bag.

  The ill fortune of his supplier, Chocapic, therefore puts him in a seriously awkward position.

  This latter accepted a delivery in the belief that it would comply with the sample, but a leak in the Go Fast car had spoiled the whole load, making it taste like petrol. The unfortunate Chocapic has paid out 180 big ones for one metre – that’s to say 180,000 euros for one hundred kilos – with no hope of any return because his ‘business partner’ Scotch is refusing the delivery, which doesn’t meet the standard he was entitled to expect.

  Taking into account the wholesaler’s margin, I had worked out that Scotch must have at his disposal 200,000 euros of liquid assets, and that what was on offer from Chocapic must be very poor quality Pakistani product.

  I went down to the phone shop on the street outside my apartment and bought a pre-paid calling card so I could contact this Scotch by SMS. Hoping the fool could read Arabic, I wrote:

  Due to recent delivery am selling half metre of quality at 250. Check photo.

  (50kg of quality hash at 250,000 euros. Check sample.)

  The next day the Second District DPJ sent me, amongst other translations, my own SMS as well as his reply and the rest of our exchange.

  How strange to be confronted with your own words. It’s like being on a balcony, watching yourself walk down the street, and walking down the street at the same time.

  When I had sent that message two days earlier, Scotch had replied straight away: OK.

  I’d followed quickly with:

  Contact Fleury Quick, today, 17h00. With photo.

  *

  It wasn’t a random decision, choosing the Fleury Quick halal fast food joint as the setting for the deal. Anything is possible in that tiny fast-food place, situated at the intersection between the main road into Paris and Rue des Peupliers, which runs past the biggest prison in Europe. Inmates’ families rub shoulders with their drug-dealing mates and the permanently broke Muslim prison staff. I used to eat there back when I was translating Disciplinary Committee proceedings inside the prison, and I remembered well its vipers’ nest feel: it was ugly, dirty, and at the same time insanely busy.

  Before showing up at my business meeting, I obviously had to change my look. Most importantly, I had to hide my white hair which stood out in a crowd of thousands.

  I had great fun disguising myself. I opted for Moroccan bled chic: fake black and gold Chanel sun-glasses, leopard print hijab, black khôl eyeliner, pant-suit with long tunic, gold bracelets (lots of them) and diamanté watch, orange nails and shiny nylons. I was unrecognisable. A very respectable Maghrebi business woman. The perfect chameleon.

  I hailed a taxi to take me there and told him to wait for me.

  I recognised my contacts as soon as I arrived.

  A joy to behold.

  Porsche Cayenne with tinted windows parked in a disabled parking spot and surrounded by discarded fast-food wrappers. Rap music and air-con blasting, doors open. They were fat bastards with stringy chin-strap beards minus the moustache, cropped pants, thongs, Fly Emirates Paris Saint Germain T-shirts accentuating rolls of lard. To top it off, a dash or two of summer-chic accessorising: a Louis Vuitton clutch resting on the paunch along with Tony Montana mirrored sunnies.

  The complete look. The new orientalism.

  ‘Hello, I’m Madame Ben Barka. I’m the one who contacted you. I’ve got some product that comes from the bled and I heard through one of your customers that you’ve got issues with your supplier.’

  The three of them looked at me as if they were hallucinating; the last thing they had expected was to have to do a deal with their mother.

  ‘Who…?’

  ‘I told you, my name is Madame Ben Barka, and I’ve got some good quality stuff from down there to sell.’

  Silence. My face is impenetrable. My eyes immobile behind my branded sunglasses.

  ‘Oh really?’ said the fat one with the PSG T-shirt at last, full of himself – Karim Moufti alias Scotch, whom I recognised by his moronic intonation.

  I pulled a 100-gram sample out of my handbag.

  ‘Here’s the photo. It’s 4,500 euros a kilo, top quality, but I’ll do you a deal if you take more than 50. I’ll do you an even better deal if you take more than that.’

  ‘How much is more?’ Scotch asked me, handling his sample of hash as if it were a dead octopus.

  The Mouftis and their mates were born in France and knew nothing about the bled except its beaches. Moroccans raised far from their native soil, their roots exposed; hydroponic Moroccans. They could just about sprinkle their speech with the odd Arabic phrase, but carrying on an actual conversation was completely beyond them. Scotch was looking at me intently, moving his lips in sync as I spoke. You got the feeling from his eyes that were dilated by the fumes coming out of his head that it was pretty hot work in that brain of his.

  ‘We can start at 50 for 225 which comes to 4,500 a kilo, which is the Spanish price for quality like this. Transportation to France is on me, but 50’s the minimum you’ve got to take. If you sell it at 10 for 60, that already gives you a margin of 75,000. I don’t work with a saraf so I want the money direct and if there’s a single note missing, it’s the last time I work with you. That’s the deal. You’ve got my number.’

  ‘How much is more?’ asked Scotch again, completely hypnotised.

  How did he manage to look so damned stupid!

  ‘More means more. Much more. But first let’s see if we can all work together, and then we’ll think about it.’

  As I left in my taxi, I looked in the rear-view mirror. The three of them hadn’t moved, still standing there stiff as boards in their thongs.

  The translations I did next were enough to warm the heart: it’s nice to know you’ve got a good product.

  Intercept No. 7432 dated Tuesday, 3 August. Intercept taken from the telephone device of the person under surveillance originating from line no. 2126456584539 the registered owner of which is not known to the Moroccan authorities. The person using the line is Karim Moufti alias Scotch. His interlocutor is Mounir Charkani alias Lizard.

  Words in Arabic translated by Madame Patience Portefeux who has been engaged for this purpose and who hereby jointly certifies this transcript.

  Scotch: On my mother’s life, I’m telling you, it’s the OG shit, totally sick. It’s got the earth in it from the bled, you can smell it, it’s so damned sick, you got grasshoppers hopping around on your head. It’s the country, man… (Laughter.)

  Lizard: You’ve smoked too much, bro’.

  Scotch: Dude, bring it on, I’m gonna work the whole year with this weird-ass godmother chick. Not even thinking if she’s a cop… It’s such good shit I’m gonna do it for you for 8.

  Lizard: You can’t help farting above your pay-grade, man. (Laughter.) Let’s see it. I wanna show a photo like that to my cousin with the wheels.

  Scotch: You know what fuckin’ Brandon said, about the 12 I showed him in the photo… He didn’t fuck around. Your juice, it’s hot shit, I’m gonna put in an order straight up, one hundred percent, that’s what he said…

  Lizard: Dude…

  Scotch: Kill two stones with one bird,
with your cousin, bro’. The Tunisian. Things are movin’ in the city. We’ll have a hookah at the Prince and have a meeting, ’cos dude, I’m feelin’ it, one hundred percent. You can start sayin’ to them already to get their notes together for a metre, I’m tellin’ you.

  I was forced to leave the word godmother in the transcript, because it appeared in French in the text that had been submitted to me. It bothered me at the time, but then I told myself that I’d just found my criminal alias. So, I’d be the Godmother. I imagined the crime squad detectives already had me down by that name in the numerous exchanges in French that didn’t pass through my filter. There was a lot of chatter going around about my hash; it wasn’t every day that such good quality product fell into the lap of dealers quite so eager to get their hands on it.

  I thought about where the transactions could take place. It had to be somewhere both discreet and safe, but also where there would be enough people around for me to feel secure. After all, I didn’t want my customers to hold me up at gunpoint and take back the money they’d just handed over to me – best-case scenario – or, even worse, to torture a confession out of me as to where I’d stashed the rest of the drugs. A place where you could give big bags to Arabs without attracting the attention of one of the thousands of patrol cars criss-crossing greater Paris thanks to the state of emergency… The Quick fast food joint parking lot was small, and thus too exposed, so I opted for the Fleury prison parking lot, where the families of the inmates are always coming and going, laden with bags. It might seem an odd place to deal drugs, but there’s no better place to get swallowed up in a crowd.

  I put my two plastic checked bags from the Tati store, weighing 25kg each, on trolleys to avoid doing my back in, then loaded them into my car in the parking space under my apartment building. I drove to another arrondissement, parked, and got a taxi to take me and the bags to Fleury. There, I asked the driver to wait for me on the edge of the great expanse of carpark, with the two bags in his boot, while I looked for my so-called nephews who weren’t answering their phones.

  I walked over to the Cayenne parked on the other side of the carpark. Breathe, concentrate. As a child, I’d learned how to cross borders with an ‘unaccompanied minor’ sign around my neck, and my pink down puffer jacket stuffed full of five-hundred-franc notes. The secret is to submit control of every molecule in your body to your mind. It’s like a bike, you don’t forget how to ride it, and not everybody can do it.

  I got into the car with the smoky windows and took out a battery-operated bank note counter. The problem was that there was a huge amount of 10s and 20s and it would have taken hours to get through them.

  ‘I don’t take small denominations!’

  ‘Money’s money,’ said Scotch, annoyed, in Arabic.

  There was something about his tone I supremely disliked. An underlying threat, along the lines you’ll take my dough, you filthy bitch – and I can’t stand that with men, especially fat bastards weighing one hundred and ten kilos who clench their fists when they’re irritated. It just makes me want to humiliate them.

  ‘10s, 20s, 50s… that’s small-time loser crap. The smallest I take is a 100. Tell me right now if you’re a loser so I don’t have to waste my time.’

  I let the word loser slide from my lips in French with a Moroccan accent you could cut with a knife. It was magnificent.

  The problem for dealers is that 10s and 20s are the currency on the streets, and they quickly turn into mountains of bank notes. These then have to be exchanged for large denominations, and that can only be done by way of a laundering system. By calling Scotch a loser, I had reduced him to a street dealer, when in his dreams he was Tony Montana. What’s more, my request would reduce his margin, forcing him to spend an extra 10 euros for every 100 euro note.

  ‘OK, I’ve got 112,500 here,’ I said, ‘which means you only get one of the two bags. Just this once, I’ll accept five hundred 50s, but it’s the last time. That other stuff is just bullshit.’

  ‘We wanna count the shit.’

  ‘No problem. Just so you know, I also do bags of 20 for the wholesale market… It’s more practical. If you want to count… Hey, you…’

  I pointed to the one who had to be Mohamed Moufti, alias Momo, Scotch’s little brother.

  I’d bet my life on my taxi driver having at least one brother in prison. I say that because on our way there, he’d used the term incarceration. I pay careful attention to words – it’s my job – and you only say that word out loud if you work in the law or if you’re involved with the law…

  In any case, the driver saw nothing unusual about a young Moroccan guy helping his mother with her laundry bags in a place where everybody is carrying large checked plastic bags filled with washing. Once he was back in his seat after removing one of the two bags from the boot, I opened it up as if I was just checking to see what was in it, and showed Scotch’s brother the 25 neatly stacked one kilo packets. The transaction was swiftly completed and everybody went their own way.

  ‘What if I find the notes for another metre before the 15th?’ Scotch asked me over the phone once I was back in the taxi.

  ‘I’ll do it for 4 for a metre and a half, 100s and 200s only though, otherwise you get nothing,’ I said, not beating around the bush, and thinking how I’d be translating the exchange the next day.

  Needless to say, the party Philippe had organised that very evening to celebrate his new position could not have come at a worse time. After my own private celebration for having made it home alive to walk the dog and finger my one hundred and twelve thousand euros, I then had to put on my game face and get myself to a café in the 20th arrondissement packed to the rafters with cops. I was not in the best of moods.

  When I arrived, he was surrounded by male and female colleagues, all chatting away while inelegantly quaffing their beer straight from the bottle. I helped myself to a – I’m not sure what it was, something white, warm, alcoholic and bubbly – then planted myself in a corner waiting for it to end.

  It’s not that I’m particularly snobby, they just don’t make me laugh anymore, all those cops, with their dodgy jokes that I know off by heart. Also, I don’t like drinking cheap plonk. Before things got a bit tight, as they say, if anybody had asked me whether I liked champagne, I wouldn’t have known what to say. It was part of my natural habitat, what had always been poured into my nonchalantly held-out glass. But after twenty-five years of unlikely drinks parties with all kinds of concoctions on offer – all of them white, bubbly and utterly revolting – one thing I have worked out is that champagne has nothing to do with all that shit. So there you go.

  I could feel Philippe’s eyes riveted on me and it was making me uncomfortable.

  ‘What?’ I said, almost aggressively.

  ‘Nothing,’ came his answer. ‘I’m just looking at you. It’s not every day I get the chance. I’m making the most of it.’ His eyes were shining with tenderness. ‘Damn, you’re quite the paradox, aren’t you. You always lower your eyes whenever anybody speaks to you, like you’re shy, but at the same time you’re giving off this feeling of kick-ass confidence – like the very worst scum bags in fact.’

  I internally acknowledged his perceptiveness, making a mental note to be a little more open in future – without carrying on like some character in Crime and Punishment, obviously.

  ‘And that’s a compliment, I suppose.’

  He smiled sweetly: ‘Of course, because compliments are all I have for you… You still haven’t told me how you really learnt Arabic.’

  ‘I’ve told you plenty of times. I’ve got a gift for languages and I studied it!’

  ‘Can you believe that yesterday, one of the Moroccans I was interviewing about the murder of that young dealer specifically asked for you, in personam… He wouldn’t take no for an answer – he had to have you, only you! According to him, you translate better than anyone else.’

  ‘What murder? Which young guy? Which Moroccan? I don’t know what you’re talking about
!’

  And it was true, at the time, I had no idea what he was referring to, when suddenly the driver who had come up from the bled together with Afid Benabdelaziz popped back into my head. I’d forgotten all about him.

  ‘It wasn’t that long ago, you know, when those drug dealers were arrested on 14 July… Even I’m up to speed and I didn’t even have the job at that point…’

  ‘Yes, yes, so much has happened in the meantime… my mother… the hospital…’

  ‘The dog…’

  ‘Yes, the dog, too!’

  ‘It’s a good thing, what you’ve done for that poor creature… If you need a hand looking after it, I’m around!’

  ‘I really love him.’

  ‘One of the dealer guys had his throat slit in prison.’

  ‘How was I supposed to know that?’

  ‘You could have read about it in the papers!’

  ‘In Le Monde diplomatique?’

  He laughs.

  ‘In all the papers, except Le Monde diplo. For sure it’s a settling of scores because a week before, his mother was attacked outside her place. We haven’t been able to find out anything more because she died of a heart attack.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I remember – the Moroccans who dumped their load on their way up from Spain… Somebody must have recovered the drugs by now.’

  ‘Probably, but something’s telling me it’s not the rightful owners. There’s a lot of chatter about it out there, especially that they were transporting it for other people… Anyway, to cut a long story short, the driver was saying nothing.

  ‘So, what ended up happening…?’

  The driver… Shit… What did he want from me?