The Dying Minutes

by Martin O'Brien

  Maybe it was those albums, memories of times past, that made Patric Polineaux dream. If either Jarrive or Delon had drawn close, they would have seen the old man’s eyes moving behind closed lids, caught the jerk and twitch of a hand or a finger, heard a whispered catch of breath.

  In that old head of his, under stray grey wisps of hair caught in the breeze, it was more than thirty years back. So distant now. Yet so close.

  Like flicking through a journal – if he’d ever kept one.

  Pages, dates. People, places.

  Two years still to endure in a thankless, fruitless marriage, the cow he’d married, Cristina d’Angelo, as much an angel as a five-headed viper. Just as his father had warned him, which had made it even worse. And barren to boot, the bitch. Barren as a Bellecaire back lot. Twenty years he’d wasted on her – time and money both. And no kids. Not a one.

  Thirty years back. When he still had his legs.

  Thirty years back. With money in his pocket and a fearsome reputation. At the top of his game.

  Thirty years back. When he first met Eddie.

  Eddie Cassin. Edina. The love of his life.

  Their cocktail waitress at Studio Cent. Him and the boys, celebrating someone’s birthday. Wives left at home; the way it was back then.

  Opening night. Down on the beach, in a corner of the bay, where the Promenade des Anglais skirts up to the port.

  The way she bent her knees to serve the drinks, back straight, those long arms, long fingers, that smile. The girls they’d brought with them just paled beside her.

  In the dream it was all so clear. So sharp. So particular.

  It could have been happening right then. Thirty years later. First time round. That fresh.

  Everything about her.

  The Marilyn Monroe hair, blonde curls tumbling over those eyes, the mouth, the lipstick, that pouting smile. The way she moved – slow, effortless. That easy, carefree swing of her. Close enough to touch, but just out of reach.

  He couldn’t take his eyes off her. None of them could.

  The way she laughed, throwing back her head, platinum curls sliding, shining.

  And in his dream he saw her now, naked, as she opened the shutters in that little apartment he’d found for her on rue Sainte Reparate, a block or so back from the flower market in the old town, close enough to smell the blooms in the early morning, when the streets were in shadow and still wet from the cleaning wagons.

  Beams in a low, warped ceiling, a sloping wooden floor, the topmost balcony, up with the pigeons, overlooking a landscape of tilting terracotta roofs baking in the heat.

  The way she’d turn back to the bed, with the lace curtains shifting behind her. Her breasts, full and tight; the swell of her hips; the long, elegant turn of her leg; the warm smoothness of her thighs.

  And always, in the bed, beside him, beneath him, above him, her sweet, secret wetness.

  The way she panted, and whispered, and begged, and groaned, and made the bedsprings screech, loud enough, it sometimes seemed, for the whole neighbourhood to hear, which thought had always pleased him.

  And afterwards, her plump lips bruised from their fucking, lighting his cigarette, passing it to him, a nipple grazing his chest, settling beside him, heart still pumping.

  Or making coffee, wrapped in that green satin dressing gown, an embroidered dragon coiling up its back. Scarlet and blue.

  The fridge in the kitchen with the squeaking door.

  The candles in the bathroom where she liked to bathe him.

  The day he took her to the races at Borély, and all three of the tips he had given her had come in.

  The day they went sailing, out to the islands, just the two of them. Lunch on the beach. Making love in the shallows.

  The day his divorce came through and he drove her along the high Corniche from Nice to Menton in his old English roadster, the wind in her hair, engine howling, the car’s interior filled with the smell of petrol, leather and scent.

  And on the terrace of Les Moulins, in that summer frock with the flower print, bare legs, blonde hair …

  The day he asked her to marry him.

  And she said yes.

  But then, as always in his dreams, fast-forwarding through the fights and skirmishing that followed, to that haunting grand finale.

  Just a few years later.

  The last time he hit her.

  The last time he ever saw her.

  Watching her run to the car he’d given her as a wedding present, that old roadster, and drive away from Hauts des Pins.

  Old Polineaux stirred then, as the arrosage started up its first spurting hiss and gentle tap-tap-tapping and a bold cicada answered from the fig trees. On the balustrade a gecko skittered over the stone. Paused. Skittered on. Disappeared over the edge.

  Tiny sounds, tiny movements, but they were enough to alert Jarrive and Delon. Switching off the television, the two men came out from the salon, moved a day bed at the far end of the terrace, making its metal legs scrape on the stone, just loud enough for Polineaux to rouse himself without either of them having to come too close.

  An old trick.

  But this time it didn’t work. He woke in a foul mood, as though one of them had shaken his shoulder, woken him from a wonderful dream.

  ‘Bitch, bitch, bitch,’ was the first thing he said. A soft, bitter whisper, blinking in the sunlight, swivelling his lizard neck to left and right as though not quite sure where he was, but his eyes fixing at last on the table and the albums, then narrowing as he remembered his dream, one arm lashing out to sweep them off the table.

  ‘The bitch. The bitch. God damn her! How dare she?’

  62

  ‘HE WOULDN’T HAVE felt a thing,’ said Christophe Labeau, one of the clinical pathologists working at the Marseilles Centre d’Examination Forensique in rue Calliope just a few blocks from La Timone hospital. To demonstrate, he tilted the head to the left and right. ‘Entry wound here,’ he said, pointing to a blackened left ear. ‘Exit wound here, as you can see,’ he continued, pointing to what remained of the right ear. ‘No shell, or shell casing, has been found, of course, but I would say a nine-millimetre slug, fired close enough to leave scorch marks on the skin.’

  Isabelle Cassier, in a gown and mask, looked at the body on the mortuary draining table. The man was naked, arms by his sides, palms down, the legs thin and slightly bowed, large feet daintily turned out, one big toe tagged. The chest was oddly sunken, the nipples an unnervingly pale pink and the genitals all but hidden under a great curling brush of black hair. A livid, y-shaped scar, roughly stitched, stretched from the points of the narrow shoulders to a little below the navel.

  Without the crumpled linen suit, a naked Jules Ranque looked oddly unfamiliar. She had only the face to work on, or more precisely the thick grey moustache, for the slack expression, the drawn, open lips with the lower teeth just showing, the closed eyes and matted hair, took longer to place. The last time she had seen him, in his office at Les Baumettes, he’d been alive, at his desk, legs crossed, a stiff, saluting hand sliding across his hair. She looked at the hand closest to her, registered the bitten, stubby fingernails. She took a breath and was grateful for the mask. She had pulled it on before going into the main autopsy theatre and knew that she had no more than a few minutes before its fresh hospital scent wore off and the real odours in that room worked their way through its fibrous cover. She’d be breathing through her mouth by the time she left the room.

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Labeau looked pleased with himself.

  ‘And?’

  ‘We don’t have the toxicology results back,’ he said, pulling the sheet over the body, ‘but I can tell you one thing for sure. Notre ami used cocaine. A lot of it. I’d say almost industrial quantities, certainly enough to seriously compromise the nasal septum. Another year or two and there wouldn’t have been much left to separate the left and right nostrils. Funny how a lot of real cokers favour a moustache, don’t you
think? It hides that red top lip they often have. He was a drinker too. The liver was in a poor state.’

  Isabelle remembered the sniffing, had thought it a nervous affectation. She had done her time working in vice and drugs, but had failed to spot the giveaway sniff, the frequent blowing and wiping of the nose. She knew why. You didn’t expect the assistant warden of a correctional institution to be an habitual drug user, so you didn’t consider it. She wondered where he got his supply. A dealer? Or one of his inmates? Or maybe he was dealing himself?

  ‘Anything else?’ she asked. She was aware of a sour smell, an odd mix of chemicals and gamey meat. It wouldn’t be long now.

  ‘That’s it. You’ll get a full report when all the results are through, but I doubt there’ll be much more.’

  ‘There’s enough to be getting on with,’ said Isabelle, and with a nod of thanks she left the room, waiting until the sealed doors closed behind her before pulling the mask from her face.

  God, how she hated these places. It didn’t matter how many times she visited, she’d never really got used to them.

  63

  YOU’RE WASTING YOUR time, Salette had told him. There’s nothing there, nothing to see.

  Probably, thought Jacquot, as he parked his car off rue Tibido three blocks back from Madrague’s pocket-sized port. But given everything else he’d found, it would have been foolish not to follow up. Just on the off chance.

  It was early afternoon and the sun was already high above Montredon, spilling across its rising, rocky slopes and slanting down into the port’s narrow streets, a cooling sea breeze, sharply scented from the drying nets and traps and wired lobster pots stacked around the small harbour, whipping up a fine dusty sand from the roads and pavements. There was the normal market day bustle, the quayside stalls covered in striped awnings, the local community bolstered by intrepid tourists who’d seen what they needed in Marseilles and were now ranging further afield. Not that Madrague was any kind of tourist destination. It was a small working port with not much to recommend it beyond a flagged memorial to those who had fought and died for their country, a terraced bar and restaurant overlooking the harbour and a single small gift shop selling toy wooden fishing boats, knotted rope key-fobs, striped nautical T-shirts and fishermen’s sweaters in roughly-knitted wool.

  But there was, thought Jacquot, as he locked his car and set off down rue Tibido, a certain charm in the clustered busyness of the place, a large proportion of its residents employed, just as Philo had been, in one or other aspect of catching and selling fish.

  When the idea of taking a look at Philo’s old apartment had first lodged in his head, it had proved impossible to shift. It nagged at Jacquot. Nibbled away. He had seen the house in Roucas Blanc where Philo had lived with Edina; now he wanted to see the other side of the old fisherman’s life. The home he’d retreated to when Edina died and Les Étagères was sold – the only home he’d had according to Salette.

  Philo’s apartment was on the top floor of a three-storey block built in the fifties on the site of an old drying shed burned down by the Germans. Back then, Madrague had been as rife with résistants and simmering insurrection as Le Panier, the hilltop warren of streets and alleyways overlooking Marseilles’ Vieux Port where Jacquot had grown up. In Le Panier, the German occupying forces had given the residents twenty-four hours to move out, before the boys in feldgrau moved in and laid charges, blowing up a large part of the quartier. In Madrague, only the drying shed had been destroyed in an attempt to smoke out a small band of troublemakers.

  Pulling out the set of keys that Salette had given him, Jacquot unlocked a planked wooden door set between two buildings and stepped into a shadowy passageway. It was cool here after the sunlit shadowless street and little more than shoulder width, its stone flagged path tilting and cracked, with blank side-walls rising up either side of him. Ten metres on, this passageway opened into a small paved courtyard, just as Salette had told him, and facing him, on the far side of this courtyard, was Philo’s block, two ground-floor apartments with two balconied floors above, two apartments a floor. One of the courtyard doors was open, a beaded fly-strip curtain cinched back to the doorframe, its doorstep crowded with pots of geranium and cactus, its windows lace-curtained. The adjoining apartment was no different – the same pots and curtains – but the door was closed. No one in, just a large black cat on one of the window sills who settled his eye on Jacquot and watched as he crossed to an outside flight of stairs leading to the two balconied levels above.

  On the first balcony there was no sign of life beyond a line of washing, the smell of spicy food and, from one of the apartments, the muted sound of a radio. Giving it just a glance, Jacquot climbed on until he came to the top floor. After the narrow passageway and tiny courtyard there was suddenly a freshness in the air, the salty scent of the sea, and, he could just make out, the sound of waves slapping against the breakwater just a few blocks away.

  The number six on Philo’s front door was brass and well polished, and Salette’s key slid into the worn old lock with a familiar glide. Jacquot pushed the door open, stepped inside and closed it behind him.

  Four rooms, two on the balcony side, two at the back, with a splinter of harbour glinting between the buildings in the next street.

  The place had been stripped to its neat, serviceable parts. A Formica kichen table and two metal-legged plastic chairs. Sink, stove, cupboards, fridge. Sitting room – two beaten-up sofas pushed against the wall and a coffee table. Bathroom – just a shower, basin and bowl. Everything clean, but sterile too. No evidence of the previous owner, and nothing yet of the next. A kind of waiting limbo, thought Jacquot in the bedroom, sitting down on the side of the bed and looking round. He got up. Opened a window and let in the ocean – the smell of it, the soft, restless, distant sound of it.

  A good place for an old fisherman to live.

  And as good a place as any for him to die.

  64

  LOCKING UP PHILO’S apartment, Jacquot stopped at every door on his way down to the courtyard and knocked or rang a bell. No one answered, even in the flat with the radio playing. Someone’s idea of home security, Jacquot thought. There’s a radio on, someone must be at home. But there wasn’t. In the courtyard, he tried the closed door, then stepped between the geranium pots and tapped his knuckles on the doorframe of the open door.

  ‘Il y a quelqu’un là?’ he called out into the dark interior.

  ‘Oui, oui, attend, s’il vous plaît.’ The voice was a woman’s, weary, broad and raw, the oui-ouis pronounced ‘weh-weh’. A fish-stall voice, used to shouting the catch and the price per kilo.

  Jacquot saw her rise out of the shadows and bowl down towards the door, a round, wide-hipped shape rocking on her trainers, whatever else she was wearing – a skirt or dress – concealed beneath a flowered housecoat grimy at the waist from the kitchen range. She came to a stop in front of him, a potato in one hand, a peeler in the other. Both were dwarfed by her meaty fists. Her hair was wrapped in a scarf, cheeks ruddy and pitted, her lips sucked in over toothless gums.

  ‘Smells good, Madame,’ Jacquot began, raising his nose to sniff appreciatively, nodding behind her towards the kitchen she had just left.

  ‘Bouillabaisse, my way. Not like Fonfon’s. Or Michel’s. Or Le Rhul’s,’ she said, reeling off a list of the best bouillabaisses to be had along that part of the coast. ‘As good as it gets, even if I say so myself. So long as you don’t mind turmeric for saffron.’ She took a step back and looked him up and down. ‘So, what can I do for you?’

  ‘Monsieur Emanetti. On the top floor. Number six …’

  ‘And? What of him?’

  ‘Did you know him?’

  The old girl gave Jacquot a skewed look. ‘And you are?’

  ‘His nephew.’

  She lowered her head into a wide, bouncy concertina of chins and the skewed look turned suspicious.

  ‘Never heard him speak of any family. Any nephew.’

  ‘Jean-
Pierre Salette gave me the key. Said I could call by.’

  The name had an immediate effect.

  ‘Ahhh … Salette? You know Salette?’

  Jacquot said that he did.

  ‘A rogue. A scoundrel. A naughty boy. So what did you want to know?’

  Jacquot shrugged. ‘About Philo. He lived here long?’

  ‘As long as me. Longer. Too long to remember.’

  ‘You must have known him well?’

  ‘As well as anyone could – as well as he would allow.’

  Jacquot frowned.

  ‘When he was here,’ she added.

  ‘Meaning?’

  She worked her lips, sucking and blowing, beady black eyes never leaving him. ‘He came and went, did old Philo. Here a week, gone for three. Sometimes longer. Last couple of years he was here most of the time, but the old coot kept his own company. Had a boat, he told me. Stayed there, too, he said. But I never saw it.’

  ‘He didn’t have visitors?’

  She shook her head, still suspicious despite his mentioning Salette. ‘Like I said, he kept to himself.’

  ‘Any girlfriends?’

  The fishwife grunted. ‘None as I saw.’

  Jacquot nodded, and knew he’d come to the end of his questions. Nothing more for him here, just as Salette had said.

  ‘You’ve been very helpful, Madame. Thank you.’

  ‘De rien. It’s nothing. My sympathies. Your uncle was a good and kind man.’