And they left, running.
I was shaking like a leaf, but not Madame Fò. She readjusted her outfit and thanked me, solemnly.
‘Not first time. Nobody like Chinese. Police never help us. Thank you.’
We each went back to our own place.
To quote that rather impenetrable Chinese proverb: talk doesn’t cook rice.
Poor Monsieur Léger was put under formal investigation for murder and placed under court supervision for having cut short, in his own way, the decline of his much-loved wife. (How has this country lost all sense of the absurd?)
Since he refused to eat, he ended up being thrown out of Les Eoliades by the manager, and wound up in the care of Nurse Ratched who intubated him to force-feed him, and eventually finished him off by puncturing his oesophagus.
Then, half way through February, a copy of the title deed to the apartment on Rue Monge dropped into my letter box. I had paid 60,000 euros for a piece of real estate worth 700,000.
When I opened the letter, I plonked myself down on the floor of my entrance hall, as breathless as if I had just run a long race. Through hard work and a few trips to Switzerland, I had managed to reconstitute my father’s savings. I’d now converted more than two million euros into pink diamonds, and I was the owner of two apartments, one for each of my girls. I could stop now.
The Léger daughter with the eyes that sparkled at the thought of money, realising that the property had reverted and that she would not have a cent of inheritance, refused to leave me alone, to the point where I had to call her brother to get the harassment to stop.
‘She’s got to stop calling and telling me I’m a filthy thief!’
‘I’ve told her to drop it, but she doesn’t want to hear it.’
‘Listen, I’m an honest person, and I’m sure, knowing the police as I do, that you must have made your own little enquiries about me… I don’t have to take this, especially seeing as my own mother is still here. I’m relying on you to make it stop, because if it doesn’t, I’m going to have to file a complaint.’
‘Yes, yes, yes… I’ll handle it,’ he said, sighing.
‘I’m not a monster and I’m prepared to make a gesture provided you take care of it. Open a savings account in your nephews’ names and I’ll give them each 20,000 euros to pay for their studies. There, I can’t do more than that.’
‘That’s already huge. You’re a good woman!’
Yes, yes, I know, I’m a good woman.
So… Scotch, Momo, Lizard, Chocapic and the others – my gang – they had all been arrested. I found out from Philippe who’d invited me to spend a weekend with his son at Le Touquet. That suited me. Everything suited me. I was on cloud nine.
Philippe and I were not sharing a room, we just ate and swam in the hotel pool together. I’m not going to lie, I was very happy for those two days, walking along the beach with DNA and pretending I had a family.
My mother, who had occupied the planet for ninety-two years, finally died on 28 March 2017.
Thinking she was doing the right thing, Anta had combed her mop of grey hair so it looked like a halo around her head. It was ridiculous. My girls and I were sitting around her bed looking at her, and all of a sudden, all three of us burst out laughing.
Despite everything, I knew they were sad because they really did love their grandmother. I can’t deny that she had always been there to look after them when I’d had to work forty-eight hours straight without setting foot in the house. Part of the money my father had left her, she had blown on them in a whirlwind of flouncy dresses and holidays on the other side of the world, buying them all the clothes I refused to pay for. Everything nice they did during their childhood, they did with her, while I was busy struggling to keep my head above water. Assuming she was capable of feeling anything, I think she loved them a hundred times more than she loved me, her only daughter, whom she saw as the enemy of her happiness and who represented everything that was hard in life. To hell with Patience and all her misfortunes, the spectacle of her misery offends me! This is all such a bore… let’s go to the sales! She was a selfish mother, and horribly unjust.
Since we didn’t have a family plot, she had asked to be cremated, with her ashes scattered in a department store.
The girls and I carried out her final wishes, selecting the Galeries Lafayette. After the ceremony at the crematorium, we divided the contents of the urn between us. I chose to scatter my share through the boutiques of her favourite designers. If you happened to find a bit of grey dust or some strange little bits of matter at the bottom of your Dior, Nina Ricci or Balenciaga suit pockets from the Spring-Summer 2017 collection – that was my mother. As for my daughters, I saw them gently sprinkle the rest over the perfume department as they stood side by side at the balustrade under the stained glass dome.
To finish up, we went off to stuff ourselves at Angelina’s tearoom in the bra section.
It’s hard to imagine a more girly celebration. For once my mother would have been satisfied.
I took advantage of her death to launder some of my money through her estate, and also accepted Colette Fò’s offer to buy my apartment. Despite my act of valour, she didn’t offer me a discount, but she did say this, which floored me:
‘You can leave drug in basement until you find other place.’
I stood there, speechless.
‘I thought you didn’t even see me,’ I stammered.
She smiled. ‘In the building we call you the phantom. But you less phantom now. Lot less.’
She invited me in for some tea and told me a little about her life. She was seven years younger than me and, like many of the Chinese in Belleville, came from Wenzhou province, a small port of eight million inhabitants, four hundred kilometres from Shanghai. She was definitely not a widow as I had imagined, and somewhere in China, there existed a Mr Fò whom she never saw and who produced counterfeit spare auto parts that she flogged to mechanics, thereby explaining the red-white-and-blue plastic Tati bags weighing two tonnes that she too was always lugging around in the lift. Her family also owned a hair factory which made extensions that were imported to France and resold to Africans in Paris who then sold them on to their country of origin. Every cent earned in China, Africa or France was reinvested in Pari Mutuel Urbain betting licences for bar-tabacs, giant money laundering machines, and from there into real estate.
You may call us wogs, vulgar foreigners, outsiders – but tremble, good people, for we shall crush you all!
She had arrived twelve years ago, reuniting with a distant uncle who was already living in our building. She had two children: a girl born in China who was now about twenty and whom she had not seen grow up, and another born in France who was twelve and with whom she had been pregnant as an immigrant. As soon as she became a French citizen, she had brought over the whole family, one at a time, including cousins and elderly family members. She had chosen her first name because Colette was the only French woman writer she had studied in Wenzhou, when she had learned our language for a year.
She was a very pleasant woman, and I was annoyed with myself for not having tried to get to know her before moving out.
I trusted her completely with my life story, as her own experiences mirrored those of my family. She asked a few questions about my job as a translator and we discovered that we had something unexpected in common, namely we both earned a living by dealing exclusively with Arabs. Her long-term dream was to break into the Maghreb market with her spare auto parts. Given that I spoke the language and had already proven myself as a business woman, she predicted a glowing relationship ahead. In a gesture of friendship, I gave her my father’s weapon, after making her promise not to use it herself but to give it to a bodyguard to protect her friends and family at their next celebration. Finally, we went down to the basement to move what remained of my stock into an old boiler room; that’s to say, exactly 463 kilos of hash, taking into account the samples I had distributed.
‘What you do with that
?’
‘I don’t know. You don’t know anybody who might be interested? I don’t need it anymore; I have enough money for my small family.’
‘Drugs, in China, death penalty. Just bring problem.’
‘I’ll get rid of it, then.’
With the money from the sale of my apartment to the Fò family, I bought a second one on Rue Monge in the same building as the Léger’s, which I moved into. So one morning in June, I left Belleville.
Philippe helped me pack my boxes and carry them down to the removal van.
When almost everything had been loaded up, and we were utterly dead on our feet, I made him a coffee. We sat on the remaining two boxes with DNA at our feet and I told him, with a hint of nostalgia, about the twenty-six years which had unfolded within those four walls. Suddenly he stood up to have a look through my cupboards.
‘If you’re looking for spoons, I’ve packed everything, they’re all gone.’
‘I’m hungry. I just feel like a little something to snack on.’
And he opened a cupboard where I had forgotten about fifteen or so packets of Chamonix Oranges.
I paled.
He opened one up happily and held it out to me.
‘I guess you must really like these!’
‘I was supposed to make an orange-flavoured tiramisu one day for one of my daughter’s parties and I never got round to it, so I was stuck with all of those. I’ve been working my way through them one packet at a time before they go out of date.’
He drank his coffee in silence, and I saw his face change.
I carried on as if nothing had happened.
‘I’ve always wondered who eats Chamonix Oranges. They’re pretty disgusting as cakes go,’ he said, quietly.
As in a near-death experience, all the clues I might have left in my wake flashed before me. I had caught sight of myself walking past windows a thousand times and I knew I was unrecognisable from the CCTV images when dressed as the Godmother. My business partners would never be able to identify me, except perhaps from my voice, but the authoritative tone I used when speaking Arabic would render even this difficult. And anyway, it was hardly France’s finest intellects we were talking about! I had only ever taken taxis, and never from outside my place. And as for my exchanges in the supermarkets, there was nothing to identify me, apart from this business with the cakes. There was only one day, the day of the fiasco in the wedding dress department at Tati, which could put me in the frame, because somewhere on a street CCTV camera from four months ago, there would be me and DNA on his leash. There was also one false translation of an intercept, but I had handled it in such a way that you could think it was a misunderstanding and not a deliberate falsification. When I heard that Scotch and his gang had been arrested, I‘d thrown out all my disguises and my money counter. I‘d only ever handled the hash with gloves on – hash that couldn’t be found, stashed away in a Chinese hidey-hole in the basement of the building. My money-laundering had been impeccable and the primary beneficiary of my largesse – a certain Detective Léger – would certainly not say anything to the contrary. As regards my comings and goings to Switzerland, I had always bought my ticket in cash at the counter at Gare de Lyon, using a fake name. And good luck to anyone trying to find my pink diamonds; they had all been inserted into lipsticks and hidden in my make-up bag. No, there was nothing except for those hideously sweet cakes with which Philippe was busy stuffing himself.
‘What’s the matter? Have they gone stale?’
He stared at me as if he thought he might be able to see right through to my brain.
‘What?’ I said, laughing.
DNA chose just that moment to come and rest his head on his thigh and beg for a pat; and right there, in the blink of an eye, he pretty much understood how I had managed to find the product to sell, accepted that he would never be able to prove it, and decided he wouldn’t take any action.
I’m so sorry, my poor Philippe, for this little death I’ve inflicted upon you… but if you’d been just a bit less honest…
‘I’m going home, I don’t feel too good…’ he said.
And the man I saw leaving the apartment of my former life was a man who, in a fraction of a second, had aged a thousand years.
He never called me again. Nor I him.
The end of my adventure was not particularly interesting, even if it did result in an affair of State.
In order to dispose of the 463 kilos of hash I still had, I contacted the Tunisians being surveilled by the Central Bureau for Illicit Drug Traffic Control, explaining that I’d been given their number by the friend of a friend of my supposed son, who was hiding some hash in his bedroom which I absolutely had to get rid of. I loaded all my product into a van I’d rented through the commercial vehicle-sharing service, Utilib, using the card of a dead Chinese man…
This time it was a whining, old, badly-dressed Godmother who ventured forth onto the streets. ‘My son… you know, his papa was killed by the Armed Islamic Group of Algeria… I’m raising him all on my own and he won’t listen to me… not to anything I say!’
I was so persuasive those guys were seriously worried for me.
‘I don’t care if he kills me, but as long as I’m alive, he is not going to prison for doing drugs. Before all this, he used to be a good student, he was kind… So, take it, take the lot, I don’t want to see it in our home anymore!’
They didn’t waste any time hanging around, and left with my hash, their car loaded up to the point that the under-carriage was almost dragging along the ground. With a huge sense of relief, I watched them disappear.
A week later, I was summoned by the examining magistrate, who wanted to speak to the Benabdelaziz’s driver. He was in the corridor, seated and handcuffed, waiting for me, his accredited translator.
‘I know it was you who took our product…’
‘Me? But what would I do with it? I have done my own research, though. I’ve listened to a lot of dealers. It took some time, but I know now who picked it up… And I think they should pay for what they’ve done because I was very fond of Khadija. It’s the Tunisians. I’ve got their name, their address, their phone number… I can give you everything.’
Et voilà.
There was some fallout with the dealers-informants-police. Some deaths. Some cops in the slammer. A big fat scandal. I’d had a good nose: those guys were indeed hybrid dealers bred by the Central Bureau for Drug Control.
The rest of the story is all there in the papers; there’s no need for me to go over it again.
No clean policing without dirty policing, they say. Well then, let’s give these state-sanctioned dealer-bureaucrats a taste of their own laws.
7
MAMBO
And what now?
Well, I’m feeling quite light-headed at the thought of all these lives opening up before me. The future is wide open. I could go back to France to work with Madame Fò, wait for grandchildren to arrive and take them to the park where I’ll watch them climb on the monkey bars… Or, like an uprooted plant, tossed about by the wind, make my way from one fireworks display to another until I’m all shrivelled up and for whatever reason am no longer able to continue. Or I could do as my mother did, and pretend to be busy, buy lots of useless stuff, play with it, grow bored with it, throw it away, return it, resell it – always in a hurry because the shops are about to close… Or else take my father’s approach, stop looking after myself and die, drowning in the rose pink sky at the end of a day like this one… Or I could simply live for myself and for the joy of seeing myself alive.
We’ll see: let’s just say that for the time being, I’m lying fallow…
*
I’ve come back to the only place in the world where people were expecting me, to Muscat in the Sultanate of Oman. I’ve settled into the hotel where my life went off the rails, the way the diamond in a record player jumps from one groove to another, from a mellow song to a ghastly jingle. Unlike the little fireworks collector’s palace,
the Belvedere, this place hasn’t changed a bit.
These days, what I love to do more than anything is slide my chair as close as possible to the window looking out over the bay. I can stay there for hours, contemplating the perfect tableau of colours composed by the pink carpet of my room, the blond wood of the window framing the bay, and the sun like an orange ball drowning in the blue light… and with that I’m replete.
It’s time to leave now, before it gets too dark. I’ve had to wait for nightfall because it’s quite a drive out to Petroleum Cemetery and DNA doesn’t cope well with the heat now that he’s getting on.
The way things turned out, my husband and I knew each other for such a short time, and it was so long ago. But I think he would have liked the woman I’ve become. I’ve arranged a fireworks display for this evening out at the cemetery, just for the two of us. I didn’t stint. I’ve chosen sparkly starbursts and bombettes that will light up the desert sky with enormous, orange-centred pink chrysanthemums.
*
And here’s a little story to finish.
It happened one evening when we were travelling together in Valparaìso. We wandered into a deserted cabaret bar called the Cinzanno Club. The decoration was dated and kitsch, and the elderly members of a tropical music orchestra were fast asleep on the stage, slumped on chairs facing out to small, empty, candle-lit tables. All of a sudden, the leader of the ensemble, an old guy with dyed hair and a body bowed by arthritis, noticed us at the door. He snapped himself upright and shouted ‘mambo’, vigorously shaking his pineapple-shaped maracas to wake up his musicians and breathe some sort of desperate energy into them.
‘Mambo.’
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
With thanks to my faithful proof-readers, Jean and Antony.
Thank you, also, to the translators and interpreters of the Palais de Justice in Paris who assisted me and whose names I will deliberately not disclose so they may continue to work.
The Godmother Page 14