‘Listen, I shouldn’t be doing this. It’s not great timing… You should rest after what you’ve been through.’ He put me to bed and I fell asleep instantly.
I woke up at around two in the morning to find a yellow dwarf rosebush on my bedside table. I tried to go back to sleep but couldn’t with that plant there; in the end, I had to get up and throw it down the rubbish chute on the landing.
So I had a lot on my mind as October came around.
At Les Eoliades, at least, a dead calm reigned, as my mother tyrannised the poor Anta whom I was paying a small fortune to endure on a daily basis the suffering I had offloaded onto her. Outside, it was autumn, and it rained every day like it does on those inhospitable planets in sci-fi movies, while on the TV, special news items taught people how to tie a tourniquet in the event of a limb being blown off by a bomb. As for my drug-dealing business, I was making Scotch sweat it out until he confessed and apologised for having tried to rip me off.
I called him every morning on WhatsApp. I was done with the phone, because while I could carefully change the odd word here and there in my translations, I had torn my hair out trying to falsify the conversation outside the Tati store so it would pass unnoticed and whoever was reading the transcripts would think the Godmother had never showed up.
Each time he would pick up and scream at me in some bastard hybrid of French and Arabic that because of me, his customers were making his life a living hell. But as he refused to confess and apologise, I simply hung up on him.
He held out a week!
‘So, I’m on Avenue Henri Barbusse and there are cops in a green Renault parked outside your place, and you can’t go anywhere without others tailing you…’
‘How do you know where I live?’
‘Your dumb-ass questions are boring the shit out of me… I’ve left a plan, in French, in your letterbox, which I want you to follow to the letter. I’m warning you – if you stray from the program in the slightest way, even the tiniest detail, I’m done with this for good. You understand what I’m saying?’
I was speaking to him in Arabic and, even though I articulated every word as though he were mentally disabled, I was never quite sure if he understood everything I said.
‘Yes, madame.’
‘Repeat it back.’
‘I read the piece of paper and I do exactly what’s written down on the paper otherwise it’s finished…’
‘It’s finished forever. Repeat it back to me…’
‘Forever.’
‘That’s right.’
Now that the group was being tailed, the big deliveries we had been doing were out of the question. To avoid having to change vehicle and play cat-and-mouse, I came up with the idea of incorporating the transactions into the dealers’ everyday routines so that the police, even if they were following them, wouldn’t suspect a thing.
The Godmother’s plan revolved around two axes: we’re going to help mum with her shopping and we’re going to lose some weight at the swimming pool.
When the Moufti family was planning to go to the supermarket – which was always around 6pm (when it was busiest) – Scotch would call the Godmother’s phone an hour beforehand, so she could set things in motion. If she couldn’t, she would send a WhatsApp message saying “no”.
If the deal was on, she would head to the supermarkets at Drancy, Bondy or Romainville (all places with no shortage of veiled women) and deposit a blue bag containing ten kilos of hash concealed beneath some vegetables at the left luggage service, in exchange for a numbered tag. She would then push her trolley around, while Scotch or his brother took a packet of Chamonix Orange cakes from the shelf, leaving an envelope with 40,000 euros under the packet below (I was now selling the hash for 4,000 to punish him. Listen, Monsieur Moufti, the minute I do it for 3.5 a kilo you rip me off, I got the message; you think the price is too cheap…) along with a second tag for a bag, also blue, also containing vegetables.
Why Chamonix Oranges? Because nobody born after 1980 still eats those sickly sweet things with their improbable shape – and because the base of the packet is the size of a C5 envelope.
Anyway, the Godmother would then collect the envelope containing her money as well as the tag for the other blue bag, at the same time as she, too, took a packet of cakes (I adore Chamonix Orange cakes), replacing the tag with her own (after surreptitiously checking the money). She would then happily continue with her shopping, pay at the cash register, before going to collect the second blue bag, while one of the two Moufti boys would return to the Chamonix Oranges to pick up a second packet along with the new bag storage tag and any other item from the same shelf (I insisted on this point to remove suspicion from what might otherwise have appeared to be a routine on the CCTV). Then, after paying at the till for the packets of cakes as well as for mum’s shopping, he would pick up the original blue bag containing the hash.
At around the same time, the Moufti family started swimming twice weekly at the Georges-Hermant pool in the 19th arrondissement.
In locker 120, code 2402 (a locker which was always empty because it was the one furthest away from where you had to tap in your code), a sports bag, this time with fifteen kilos, would be awaiting its future owner in exchange for an envelope and another sports bag, identical but empty. There were no cameras in the changing rooms, so the Godmother could swim in complete anonymity with her cap and goggles on, crossing paths in the lanes with two fat, ungainly, frozen seals, namely Scotch and his brother. It was winter, and it was cold as hell. I like cold water – those two, not so much. It was pretty funny.
The results… At the supermarket – October: 3 deliveries; November: 7; December: 7; January: 4. At the pool – October: 2; November: 8; December: 8; January: 4.
After two deliveries where everything went smoothly, I lowered my prices back to 3,500 a kilo.
I’d shifted a total of 540 kilos, but the work! And I was only packing and delivering, whereas they were cutting, weighing, re-packaging, selling, collecting the cash, finding buyers, converting into bigger denominations, laundering… They looked like death warmed up and, as it happens, were losing quite a bit of weight. When magistrates treat dealers as layabouts, they truly show how little they understand about the vast amount of work involved in the drug industry.
I knew that Philippe must be tearing his hair out. The few telephone intercepts I had been given to translate evoked a banal, small-time drugs operation with only fifty kilos finding its way to market every week. The reason he hadn’t decided to bring in Scotch and his little friends (who, it seemed, were growing in numbers, given the personnel needed for this sort of dealing) was because he was still running after the Godmother, and it was sending him crazy. Despite his relentless analysis of the transcripts, and even going so far as to view on loop the CCTV footage of the gangs’ most frequented hang-outs, he was drawing a blank.
And then half way through January, a series of strange things happened.
On the 10th, following one of my swimming pool transactions – I remember the date because Scotch’s whole gang ended up getting arrested soon afterwards, on the 20th), I had arranged to meet the Léger daughter outside the BHV store to pay my monthly annuity. We had a coffee together, ranted on about the manager of the aged care facility, and I took 20,000 euros out of the envelope to give to her. Then, with the remaining 32,500, I went into the store where I had a manicure appointment, my first in twenty-five years.
I was going to town: would my nails be baby pink, navy blue or lime green? I had been happily tormented by this issue for a week.
I don’t know if it was the smell of the varnish or because I was tired after my swim but I passed out and fell off the chair in the Nail Bar, gashing my head.
The paramedics gathered me up, with my bloodied face, and took me off to hospital, and as they rummaged around in my handbag looking for some identification, they immediately came across the envelope. When I regained consciousness, they asked me if a relative could be notified, as I
was suffering heart failure and they had to keep me in so I could be seen by a cardiologist.
As soon as I heard the words notify a relative, I tore off all the things stuck to my chest like a woman possessed, and jumped out of bed in my underwear in a total state of panic.
‘I’m completely fine… Now give me back my things!’
‘We can’t let you leave.’
‘Yes you can, you just have to inform me of the consequences of my decision to leave – so, there, I’m informed. I’m perfectly informed. Now give me the papers to sign and hand me back my things.’
The intern gave me a super suspicious look as he held out my bag with one hand, and my envelope with the other.
‘Yes – you found an envelope containing 32,500 euros in cash… Big deal! I’m sure you’d love an explanation, but frankly, I don’t have to give you any… So – hand it over!’ And I snatched the envelope from his hands.
I left the hospital in as dignified a fashion as I could manage, and took a taxi home.
So my heart is giving out too, I thought, on arriving back home. And because I really did have other fish to fry, I took the information for what it was, namely something that would have to be dealt with in future, nothing more.
For as long as I can remember, my father had had to take his drops for his heart. From time to time, I would see him sit down on a bench, out of breath. One drop, two drops… and hop, he would be off again like a Duracell bunny whose batteries had just been changed. When he was about sixty, a pacemaker was suggested because the notorious drops were no longer up to the job. He refused.
It was over a platter of shellfish at La Coupole on Boulevard du Montparnasse, while greedily slurping down oysters, that he announced to us his decision to retire from life, much the way he would have told us he was going to retire from business. He had already started to dissolve Mondiale and to divide up its assets between all of his employees. At the same time, he’d accumulated in his safe deposit box a large stash of Krugerrands, those pretty South African gold coins each weighing an ounce and minted with the image of a springbok. Worth more than a thousand euros a piece, these were intended to guarantee my mother’s lifelong financial security. As for me, well, seeing as life had endowed me with an exceptional husband, he declared that evening in his immense clairvoyance… I didn’t need a thing!
Atropine.
I realised that for a year now I’d been having difficulty going up stairs without stopping to catch my breath… Not that it was an issue, I told myself, given that I spent all day in front of a computer.
It was only once I started lugging bags of hash from one place to another that my under-performing heart became a problem. My visit to the cardiologist only confirmed what I already knew.
If you can no longer find a way to work or to enjoy yourself, you may as well pack your bags and check out, my father had said to us that evening…
To see him swallowing his oysters with the appetite of an ogre, it was hard to believe he had already planned his death. Truth be told, though, it had been a good fifteen years already that he had been chewing over his plan. Since the business with Martine, actually – that was when life started to lose its interest for him.
Martine was the daughter of a soldier, blonde with green eyes, an apprentice hairdresser, who had the bad idea to die from an overdose at the age of seventeen in August 1969, in the toilets of a casino in Bandol. Her death was followed by a hysterical campaign orchestrated by the Gaullist politician, Alain Peyrefitte, who pointed the finger at hashish, LSD and heroin as the root of all evils: that is, pornography, homosexuality, miniskirts, the degeneracy of the younger generation and the decline in moral values generally… In short, the chaos of May 1968. This tightening of the screw towards the right led to a law criminalising the importation and sale of drugs that, until then, had not caused anybody any problems seeing it was the French connection that was supplying 90 per cent of America’s heroin. Mondiale was thus deprived of the most lucrative branch of its operations.
The second great blow to his morale came in 1974 with Djibouti’s independence. That French enclave, where he would go whenever he had a moment and where he had set up an office, reminded him of his colonial Tunisia. During the years of French presence, Djibouti was (and, by the way, still is) a nest of crooks – laundering banks, soldiers’ brothels, weapons-stuffed containers en route to the African interior, alcohol and cocaine destined for the Persian Gulf. The place was rife with Corsicans, Italian pieds-noirs and Lebanese, all of whom knew my father and in whose company he felt completely at home. He made a lot of money there, but Independence cost him a fortune. I remember seeing him one Sunday, angrily burning bags and bags of French Afar and Issa bank notes in the leaf pit on The Estate.
To lose his patch a second time was too much; after that he was never the same. The speed limits on the motorway cost him his Porsche, after he was done doing 260. He was forced to buy a pathetic, dirty grey, sales-rep car which made him sad just to look at it, and which my mother would climb into with a disdainful pout… And then the Left came to power in 1981, and with them the solidarity tax on wealth, the 39-hour week, retirement at 60… All the so-called ‘protective public policy provisions’ aimed at defending society’s most vulnerable members against large predators like him – the sort of man who might haul a driver out through twenty centimetres of open car window to head butt them for something as trivial as having cut in front of him.
Either you adapt, or you die… When it came to living in a country run by sermonising teachers, well, at some point he chose the latter.
After taking his leave from the two of us that day in 1986 at La Coupole, he left for Djibouti; and there, because he loved the Red Sea, wooden sailing boats and the books of his childhood friend, Henry de Monfreid, he cast off. Two months later, they found him dead, still sitting on the bridge of his boat, his body turned towards the sun.
He didn’t commit suicide, he allowed himself to die to the beat of his own drum and at a time that suited him. We understood and we shed no tears.
There was a second bizarre thing that happened to me around that time, and I still can’t get it out of my mind… A real-life plot twist of the sort I had been waiting for in vain for years.
It unfolded at Les Eoliades.
Ever since they had moved Monsieur Léger to our floor, he would give a small yelp, calling out to his wife every time she went past his room. It was a super irritating little noise that reminded you of the sound baby llamas make calling after their mothers. A feeble, questioning mmm-mmm. Horrible!
She would stand there looking at her husband, stationed outside his door sometimes for ages, but all the poor man’s frantic efforts to penetrate the thick fog of her memories were in vain, and at some point Madame would suddenly head off with her Zimmer frame on her path around the floor, forgetting why she had stopped. It was this that would make him weep, round after round, all day long. I’d already told the Léger children many times that it had been a bad idea to put their two parents on the same floor, but they found it more practical when they visited and apparently believed it was beneficial for their father to see his wife.
On 20 January, at around 8pm, when the carers were busy getting the whole floor to bed, I heard an unusual noise coming from Monsieur Léger’s room, followed by the infamous mmmmmmmm, only this time it was continuous and he was singing.
I was very distracted – there had been no envelope that morning at the Romainville Monoprix under my Chamonix Oranges, and my hash hadn’t moved from the storage locker at the pool – so I wasn’t paying much attention. What’s more, my mother was being particularly bloody trying that evening, asking me for a frozen Diet Coke, not a cold one, like the one she was refusing to drink and had deliberately poured onto the floor. After mopping it up, I went off to fetch another can from the dispenser, passing Monsieur Léger’s room on the way, lost in thought and not looking in to see why he had been singing continuously for twenty minutes. When I came ba
ck with my can, a carer was calling for help. Monsieur Léger was just finishing off strangling his wife, using his one good arm, holding her in the crook between the upper- and the fore-arm. The carer was trying to make him loosen his grip, but he had his wife too firmly around the neck. By the time I got to the room, it was too late. Madame Léger was dead.
With my mother, I had truly thought I’d entered some sort of inner circle of Hell for the Elderly. Apparently not, I told myself, as I looked at the aged assassin singing away.
‘Ikh vil ein coca…’ came the shout from the neighbouring room. My mother. She was still with us.
The third event took place in my stairwell.
On the last Saturday of that unforgettable January, my neighbour from across the landing was marrying off her twenty-year old daughter with the extravagant display of wealth you would expect from a Chinese wedding. White limousine parked outside the building, an abundance of flowers worthy of a mafia godfather in the hall and stairwell … Families going up and down for hours to demonstrate their allegiance and hand their cash-filled envelopes to Madame Fò, whose door was open to receive them.
All of a sudden, I heard yelling. Through the peephole at my front door, I saw a gang of four extremely fast and aggressive black guys descend on the guests, throwing punches and snatching bags, and showing no hesitation whatsoever at bashing up women and the elderly in order to get their hands on Madame Fò’s cash. Three of them burst into my neighbour’s place to steal all her money, while the fourth kept lookout, his back to my door. Acting on pure reflex, I grabbed my weapon, went out and aimed my revolver at the jaw of the guy closest to me, a kid barely fifteen years old who stared at me, panic-stricken. Everything froze. There was screaming in Chinese from all around. I don’t understand that language, but I did know they all wanted me to pull the trigger.
‘Hand over the bags and get out of here before they lock the doors on you for good.’
The Godmother Page 13