by Michelle Wan
It was growing dark by the time they reached Le Clos de Jeannot, a waterfront property that stood on the north shore of the River Dropt, just on the border between the departments of the Dordogne and Lot-et-Garonne. The chalets were nothing more than a pair of weathered pine cabins with identical cookiecutter design facades, suggesting that they aspired to an alpine setting. They, too, were locked and shuttered, although the sandy road running past them had seen recent traffic. The site offered no special amenities. Perhaps guests were meant to swim in the river, for there was a patch of shingle that could pass as a minute beach on which a picnic table stood lopsidedly, like a piece of jetsam abandoned by the sluggish, green current.
The dogs were running back and forth, tongues out, tails up. Bismuth found a plastic bag of garbage along the side of the first cabin. Julian chased him off before he could rip into it. Then, frowning, he squatted down and opened the bag. It was full of greasy food wrappers, plastic milk bottles, chicken bones. He stood up, signaled Mara to stay where she was, and slipped quietly around the rear of the cabin. Everything was utterly still. A loose shutter gave him a view of the interior. He made out nothing but the dark shapes of furniture upended against a wall. He was moving toward the second chalet when Mara was suddenly beside him.
“I think there’s someone in there,” she said in a low voice. “Bismuth is scratching at the door.”
Together they crouched behind a screen of bushes. The other cabin was set downstream and a little further back from the river in a copse of trees. Bismuth was on the porch, looking up expectantly. He whined softly and clawed at the bottom of the door. Jazz, on the pathway leading up to the porch, gave a sharp bark. Bismuth continued whining.
The door opened cautiously. Bismuth wagged hopefully. A booted foot shot out to drive the dog off. With a yelp, Bismuth shied away, tail between his legs. A trusting animal, Bismuth was sure this human had not meant to kick him, so he edged back cautiously to try another friendly approach. From his position on the path, Jazz barked again. The door opened wider and a head poked out. It was bound in a print scarf tied at the back. In the dying light, Julian made out dark curls springing out from the front of the scarf, thick eyebrows that curved over two large eyes. The nose was long, the cheeks fat with the fullness of childhood not yet outgrown. Somehow Julian felt he knew the face; it was enough for him to realize that the person in the doorway was not Nadia.
“Va-t-en! File!” a voice yelled. The door slammed shut.
“Wait,” Julian said, putting a restraining hand on Mara, who was already on the move. “Until it gets dark.”
“It’s not that,” she whispered. “I just remembered it’s Friday. We’ve forgotten about Loulou again. He’s probably waiting for us right now at Chez Nous. I left my phone in the van.”
Julian swore. “Leave it. He’ll forgive us.”
A half-hour later, as night closed in around them, thin lines of light became apparent between the shutters of the second chalet. Julian and Mara made their way toward it and stepped quietly onto the porch. Julian reached down and scratched at the door. Jazz and Bismuth, attracted by this dog-like behavior, trotted up to investigate. Julian went on scratching. Jazz, intensely interested, barked. Julian heard footsteps. The instant the door was jerked open, he was through it, followed by Mara and the dogs.
“You’re supposed to be dead, you little bastard!” Julian roared, flinging himself onto the figure that tried to squirm away. “Maybe you’d like to tell me what the bloody hell is going on?”
• 41 •
“Who are you?” the young man said. He was lying flat on his back, looking very frightened.
“Julian Wood,” said Julian, stooping over him. “You called me, remember?”
“This is Kazim?” Mara was so startled that she nearly dropped the length of wood that she gripped like a club.
“Leave me alone!” Kazim cried out shrilly, but he seemed to have no real fight in him. “And get those dogs out of here. I don’t like dogs.” Jazz and Bismuth were circling around, toenails clicking on the wooden floor.
Julian grabbed Kazim by the shoulder, flopped him over onto his stomach, and kneeled on him. “You’re in no position to be picky about your company.” He yanked the scarf off the young man’s head and bound his wrists behind his back. Then he leaned down to address Kazim’s left ear.
“You really are a piece of shit, aren’t you. Do you know your mother is crying her heart out because she thinks you’re dead?”
“Well, I’m not,” Kazim retorted sulkily. “All right?”
“Not all right, you little merdeux. If you’re not dead, whose body was it they found in the skip?”
“I’m not saying anything to you.”
Julian yanked the curly head back sharply and let it free-fall to the floor. Mara winced.
“Let’s get something straight. I will ask you questions. You will give me answers. Otherwise I will beat them out of you. Clear?”
“Okay, okay,” Kazim gave in.
“So talk.”
Kazim talked, punctuating his sentences with the meaningless quoi that seemed nowadays to be the inevitable tag to everyone’s speech.
“It was Peter, quoi. The English guy living with Nadia. He stole the caps I gave her. He overdosed. He was a jerk, a zéro. And before you go on about my mother, my father knows I’m alive. Who do you think has been bringing me food, quoi?”
“Your father knew all along? He purposely identified Peter as you? Why?”
“Oh, merde. Do you need everything spelled out? The Ton was after me, quoi. It was the only way I could shake him.”
“You were selling drugs?” Mara asked.
“Nadia did the pushing, not me.”
“Speaking of Nadia”—Mara looked around her—“where is she?”
“That little bitch? How should I know?”
“She’s not staying here? The police are looking for her, you know.”
“So’s my old man.”
“Wait a minute.” Mara exchanged looks with Julian. “Did you happen to talk to your father about her on the phone last night?”
“Might have done. What’s it to you? He blames her, all right?” Kazim burst out. “He thinks what happened is all her fault. He wants her punished. What”—Kazim broke off as Julian stood up and hauled him to his feet—“what are you going to do with me?”
“Personally, I’d like to kick the crap out of you.” Julian shoved him toward the door. “But first I’m taking you home.”
“Then what?”
“Then I’m going to drop you in it.”
•
Julian made Kazim lie on the floor of the van and tied his ankles with a length of nylon cord. Mara drove, and Julian sat in the back with the Ismets’ errant son, riding shotgun, so to speak. Far from being silent, Kazim talked volumes on the drive to Brames. He seemed relieved at being found and did not object even when the dogs nosed him.
“It was my cousin in Istanbul who started it, quoi,” he said, as if to exonerate himself. “He’d bury maybe 50 grams of H in with our supplies for the store. I’d cut and sell it here through Nadia. She uses, and she knows her way around. Then I’d send my cousin a share of the profits, and he’d send more stuff. But I want one thing straight. My parents never knew a thing, okay?”
“How did Ton-and-a-Half come into it?” Mara asked over her shoulder. “Were you dealing for him as well?”
“No way,” said Kazim vehemently. “Oh, I knew who he was, quoi. Him and that axeman of his. But the last thing I wanted was to get mixed up with either of them. And that was my problem. The Ton got word someone was working locally, and he didn’t like it, quoi.”
“So you were competing on his turf?”
“Merde, you just don’t get it, do you? He’s got his own pipeline, I mean big volume, and he didn’t want my chicken-piss action bringing in the cops. So he put the word out, quoi. He wanted my ass!”
Julian intoned grimly, “I’ll bet he did.”
“Yeah. So
Nadia tells me I have to cool it, quoi. But then my father gets this stupid idea about Elan and me dressing up as a salepar. I don’t want to, but he makes me do it. So here’s me, working the markets dressed up in this fairy Turk outfit, fucking slippers on my feet, great stinking jug on my back”—Kazim’s voice cracked slightly—“and who should I see one day but the Ton and Serge coming toward me in the crowd. I nearly crapped my pants, quoi.”
“So you started a fight to get yourself arrested,” Julian cut in. “And then you disappeared. You think fast, I’ll give you that.”
“Yeah.” Kazim gave a hoarse laugh. “But the funny thing of it was, turned out the Ton hadn’t even figured out who I was yet, quoi. Not until you started asking around for me, quoi!”
“For Christ’s sake, stop saying quoi,” Julian snapped in irritation.
“Then what happened?” Mara asked, barely able to keep her eyes on the road.
“I hung out at Nadia’s. But I was running low on cash, and she was leaning on me for rent, quoi. I knew my cousin was due to send another shipment, so one night I went back to the store for it. I let myself in, and I had to go through all the new foodstuffs before I found it in a bag of spices. But I saw right away I couldn’t leave things like they were, boxes broken open, bags torn apart. So I had to make it look like a trashing, quoi. And I had to be quiet about it, with my parents sleeping upstairs. You ever try trashing a place without making a sound? I didn’t break anything except the glass in the door, just made a mess, quoi.”
“You really are a toe rag,” snarled Julian.
“At least I didn’t take the cash.” Kazim sounded huffy. “And I couldn’t bring myself to write racist shit on the walls the way some would have done.”
“Oh, good of you.”
“What else could I do? I couldn’t tell them. They’d have gone straight to the cops, quoi.”
At this point Kazim seemed to dry up. Maybe he was thinking of his parents. More likely, Julian thought, of the trouble he had landed himself in. If his imagination stretched to it, he might also have wondered about what would happen to his father for having falsely identified Peter and burying him as his own. What kind of penalty did that carry?
Julian nudged him with his foot. “Go on. What happened next?”
“You happened,” said Kazim sullenly. “You spread the word on who I was and that I rode a red Honda Bol d’Or. It was easy for the Ton’s men to spot me after that, quoi. A junkie named Deep Freddy told Serge you were after me, and the Ton sent Serge to get to me before you did because he figured you were a narc.”
“You should have gone straight to the police.” Mara glared at Kazim’s prone form in the rear-view mirror and immediately found herself swerving to avoid dropping them in a ditch.
“Are you crazy? And put myself in it? I would have been all right, but that vache Nadia sold me. Serge caught up with me outside her place. He sticks this fucking gun in my ear, and says, ‘The Ton wants a word.’
“So then he ties my hands and blindfolds me and dumps me in the trunk of his car, and we drive. When we get to where we’re going, he drags me out, and I’m shitting myself because I’m pretty sure he’s going to waste me, quoi. But he pushes me ahead of him and pulls the blindfold off. I’m in some kind of room full of ferns and stuff, quoi, and I see the Ton and a woman, and the Ton says, ‘Welcome to the party, son.’ He says, ‘You hungry? You want something to eat?’ And I start to feel better because why feed me if he plans to bump me off, quoi? He says, ‘Open your mouth, kid,’ and I open my mouth, and Serge jams the barrel of his gun in it. It nearly broke my front teeth, and it cut the back of my throat. I’m choking on my own blood, and the bastard keeps shoving the thing in. ‘ This is the amuse-gueule,’ Serge says, and you can tell the salaud’s enjoying himself by the way he says it. Then the Ton says he’s a businessman and he’s interested in my little pipeline. He says, ‘Who’d’ve thought a snot-nosed kid like you could think up such a sweet set-up?’ Which I guess was a kind of compliment, except I wasn’t feeling all that good about it, quoi. He says he’s got a proposition for me. I go home, do business as usual, only now it’s his associates in Istanbul at the other end, and the shipments are in kilos, not grams. As long as I do my job, he says, I’ll be okay, my parents will be okay, and there’ll be a year-end bonus for me, quoi. I tell him I don’t know what he’s talking about, I don’t do drugs, and he laughs and says, ‘Dunk him.’
“So Serge grabs me and dumps me in a tub of water, a Jacuzzi, quoi. They turn the jets on and he shoves my head under and keeps it there until I think I’m going to burst. Then he pulls me up for a bit and the Ton asks if I’ve changed my mind, and when I say no, Serge pushes me under again and keeps on doing it until I’ve pretty much swallowed the whole fucking tub, quoi. On one of my times up I hear the woman say they should be careful not to drown me, but Serge keeps on shoving me under and pulling me up until I crack, quoi. I say, ‘Okay, okay, I’ll do it.’ So then the Ton says, ‘Lift him.’ So Serge pulls me out and dumps me on the ground, and I’m puking my guts out in a fucking flower bed. And the Ton says, ‘Okay, we got a deal.’ And he says to Serge, ‘Get him out of here and lose him.’”
“That was it?” Mara broke in, incredulous. “Luca let you go like that?”
“Well, he got what he wanted.” Kazim sounded aggrieved. “He knew I’d keep my end of the bargain, because if I didn’t, he’d fix me, and not just me, my parents, too, quoi. But I told him, no way. They had to drive me back to Périgueux because I didn’t know where the fuck I was, and I had to get my bike, quoi.”
“Zut!” Julian had to admire the kid’s crazy nerve.
“So Serge took me back to Nadia’s, but my bike wasn’t where I left it. I figured, merde, some shithead’s stolen it. I went up. Nadia looked like she’d seen a ghost. Then I knew my bike hadn’t been stolen, the bitch had sold it. I hadn’t been gone more than a few hours, and she’d already sold my bike, quoi! She said she thought I was history, so why would I need it?
“But she had a bigger problem than me on her hands. Peter had been into her fanny pack and took the H she had off me. He’d overdosed, and now he was out cold. I had a look at him. ‘He’s not out,’ I told her. ‘He’s meat.’ She knew it, just didn’t want to believe it, quoi. Brigitte had taken off by then, and Nadia was in a real sweat. She didn’t want a dead junkie on her hands. So I told her I’d take care of it, but she had to give me the money she got for my bike. She said she only got a thousand euros, but I said, ‘Don’t con me, bitch. That bike was worth ten thousand new,’ and she coughed up another two thousand. I figure she still kept most of it back. Junkies are like that, quoi.”
“So that’s when you got the idea to put Peter’s body in the skip? You put your ID on the body so it would be identified as you?”
“Yeah. Nothing with a photo on it and enough cash to make it look right. Nadia helped me carry Peter down. I wanted to leave him in the street, where he’d be found right away, but she insisted on putting him in the skip and covering him up with junk.”
“You’re a right piece of work,” Julian informed him. “I don’t suppose it ever occurred to you that Peter has family who should have been informed of his death, who still need to be told?”
“It was a way out of my problem, all right?” Kazim said, with the heartlessness of youth. “Anyway, I told Nadia she had to lose herself, and if she got picked up by the cops she had to swear the body was mine, quoi. She said she’d do it, and I knew she would because with the Ton thinking I was dead, the heat’d be off her, quoi. That’s how her mind works. But now I had another problem, because my parents were going to think I was dead.”
“Good of you to consider it.”
Kazim said defensively, “Look, I called my father, okay? I told him, I’m alive, but tomorrow they’re going to find a body with my ID on it, quoi. I said if he wanted me to go on breathing he had to identify the body as mine, not to ask questions, and not to tell my mother. That was the hard part”�
��Julian was surprised to hear Kazim’s voice catch slightly—“letting my mother go on thinking I was dead. But I knew she’d tell the cops if she found out the truth. I figured once the Ton heard I was history, he’d leave my parents alone. But it didn’t work like that. He never really needed me, just the shop as a front, and he could deal with my father just as well as me, quoi. Except my father wouldn’t go along with it.”
“And that’s why Luca had him beaten up,” Julian concluded.
“Yeah,” said the Ismets’ son, after which he fell silent. By then, they were entering Brames. Julian wanted to believe that Kazim was thinking about what he would say to his mother when she discovered that he had faked his own death. He wondered what Osman would say to Betul, for that matter.
Kazim insisted that they take him in through the back. He was terrified of being seen by Luca’s goons, who might be watching the shop. Julian could understand his fear, since the lad was supposed to be dead, but it was half past nine at night, and there was no one in the streets. All the same, he obliged. The alley, as they nosed into it, was empty. Julian pulled up behind the shop. The downstairs of the Ismets’ building was dark. Only a single light showed in an upper window.
“Get out,” Julian said, opening the rear door of the van and dragging Kazim out by his feet.
“Hey, untie me. How do you expect me to walk, quoi?”
“Hop.” Julian was taking no chances with the Ismets’ slippery son. “You have a key, or do you knock?”
“I got a key,” said Kazim sulkily. He indicated his jeans pocket. Mara dug it out. It came on a ring attached to a metal disk stamped with a death’s head. However, she found that the door had been left unlocked.
“That’s funny,” said Kazim. “My parents always lock up at night.”
Mara turned back. “I don’t like this.”
“Neither do I,” muttered Julian. Nervously he pushed the door open and listened. Silence. “You’d better be playing straight with us, Kazim,” he hissed and maneuvered the boy through the doorway first, securing him by the belt. They stepped inside.