Arab Jazz
Page 7
“Their brothers, Moktar and Ruben: 75-Zorro-19.”
“Sorry?”
“A local rap group. If I remember rightly, the four members were Moktar and Ruben—the guys the girls mentioned—as well as Alpha and Mourad . . . I’d put good money on them being Bintou and Aïcha’s older brothers. Nowadays they’re fully paid-up regulars at the Salafist prayer room along with Moktar.”
“Are you trying to tell me that Bintou and Aïcha’s brothers are Salafists? Odd. Doesn’t really fit. I think I’ve heard of Ruben. If we’re talking about the same guy, he belongs to a new Hasidic circle whose name escapes me. A group set up by Jews from Tiznit in Morocco. They split from a movement that originated in Belarus and reestablished themselves with their own rebbe—in Brooklyn.”
“Rebbe?”
“A messianic religious leader, if you prefer.”
“How do you know all this?”
“I sometimes flick through La Tribune Juive at the newspaper kiosk, and every now and then I grab a coffee at the kosher salon de thé on rue André-Danjon, that one where all the moms meet after dropping the kids off at the Lubavitch school. I listen in on their conversations. Not long ago I heard them talking about a certain Ruben. This Moktar . . . Is he the guy that preaches at the crossroads on rue Petit?”
“The very same. An old pal of your Ruben. So, to recap: we’ve got three Salafists, one Hasidic Jew, and a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses . . . That is one holy hornet’s nest! While we’re waiting, I can’t even remember the last time I ate. I’d kill for a steak—how about an onglet at the Boeuf Couronné?”
Rachel stands up, checking her watch.
“5:30. Bit early. Let’s swing by the Bunker first. Settle up and get a receipt. I can’t be bothered to dither around with expenses forms again . . . Don’t forget to write their names on the back.”
“Yes, boss! Oh yeah . . . What are we going to do about those new pills Onur told us about?”
“Not sure yet. We haven’t got time to deal with that right now. I’ll ask Gomes to see if he can get anything more on it.”
“Dear old Gomes . . . And to think you pick on me about me and Léna!”
“Well I’ve never slept with him, and there’s not the slightest danger of that happening!”
“That’s even worse—you’re stringing him along!”
Rachel laughs.
“Touché, we’re even. Can we go now?”
7
A few miles south and several orbits later, Ahmed gently touches down from his Himalayan odyssey. The walls holding up his friend’s dingy pad fall back into focus: naked women; porn cartoons; Hendrix photos. The light has faded, and so too the pressure in his head. He’s not far from feeling alright. Al is smoking and doodling. There are sheets of A4 paper scattered in front of him scribbled in words and drawings. He signs the bottom-right of the last one, gathers up the pages and hands them to Ahmed.
The Ballad of the Serial Killer
(an illustrated song for the times)
All the girls on the métro
All the girls in pink
Too many slappers, too many
Gotta do something
Sex makes me sick
I’m all about purity
Under their dark glare
I feel in danger.
Stronger than me
Yeah . . . it’s
Stronger than me
Them with the brown hair, the big booties
I got to . . . kill them
A backyard, a box room
A blade for cuttin’, shut it!
The girl lets it happen
Not so proud!
Stronger than me
Yeah . . . it’s
Stronger than me
Them with the brown hair, the big booties
I got to . . . kill them
Still in ma’ pocket
I got a pair of tights
Ain’t nothin’ better, trust
For killin’ slow
In her dyin’ eyes I took pleasure
In the street, I take a chance
I step lightly
Stronger than me
Yeah . . . it’s
Stronger than me
Them with the brown hair, the big booties
I got to . . . kill them
A moral to the story
To kill’s to live too
No philosophy simpler
For the serial killer.
The accompanying sketches are very lifelike, harking back to the golden age of the old-school Détective magazines. Ahmed is transfixed by the penultimate one. It features the killer seen from behind. His neck thick like a bull’s. Massive shoulders. Unlike in the song, the victim is looking not at her killer but at the reader. At him, Ahmed. Exactly the same look as that night. Exactly the same shoulders, too. Ahmed looks at Al as he rolls his umpteenth joint, his eyes elsewhere. It’s cool, the dude’s a shaman. Images come to him. I was totally wired when I arrived here. He got inside my head and purged me with his drawings. He looks up from the final sheet, feeling calmer.
“Not bad, man! If only I could follow your lead and get all my obsessions down on paper, that would free up my head space for a shitload of other stuff . . . Girls, for starters . . . You know, the last five years I’ve completely stopped thinking about girls. Lucky enough if I even noticed they were there. Since Laura’s murder it’s all come flooding back. There’s this policewoman . . . I don’t know . . . There’s something about her . . .”
“A policewoman! Yeah, boy! Rock ’n’ roll!”
“Thanks for having me around, man. It’s done a lot of good. I’ll come back some time.”
“In three years?”
“Maybe five . . . Or two weeks. The important thing is I’ll come back.”
The summer’s night is falling slowly. Ahmed heads back northeast in no rush. His little stroll has allowed him to recalibrate. He thinks of Dr. Germain. It’s time to get back on that couch. To talk. Talk until he can at last bring himself to discuss that night at the furniture store. And it’s not like psychoanalysis was that bad. It was quite fun, thinking back, even if at the time it didn’t make him laugh much. He remembers the last sentence he uttered: “The trouble with girls, doctor, is that you have to make them come!”
“You have to?”
Germain’s trump card had stopped him in his tracks. Then, for a whole year, he couldn’t say a single word. He replayed the film over and over in his head—a succession of different actresses but always the same scenario . . . A girl notices him and shows an interest. He won’t even stop to wonder whether he likes her or not. Generally speaking she’ll be fairly pretty. So he leaps on this golden opportunity, fully aware of his inability to seal the deal. He’ll then set about trying to satisfy her on every level. Until it fizzles out completely and he loses any notion of who he is and what he wants in life. In the end, the girl gets fed up with spending her time with such a slippery bastard and takes off without thinking for a second why she’d set her heart on such a passive boy. But each to their own psychoanalysis . . . He knew where this imperative for making women come originated: his mother. But this, this was the abyss, the black hole. “Hole?” Germain would have said. The second he started thinking about his mother, his brain would freeze. He used to blank out, develop facial tics, and end up collapsed in a heap. This was what it was like for a whole year on the couch—nothing. Eventually he got sick and tired and stopped going. But today, something’s clicked. To put it to the test, he thinks back to the shrink’s “You have to?” and he starts laughing.
Wandering along the canal path he finds himself at Café Prune. Spitting distance from Dr. Germain’s. Throughout his years of psychoanalysis he’d go there for a macchiato before each session, even though he never took milk in his coffee any other time. Only on Mondays and Fridays at 8:45 a.m. Today, despite the fact it’s 9:00 in the evening, he enters the favorite haunt of the bobo hipsters in the tenth arrondissement and heads to the bar.
The waiter—black hair, black T-shirt, burgundy apron—seems to recognize him vaguely. When he brings over the coffee, Ahmed, acting on a sudden impulse, asks for the telephone book. The guy gives him a funny look and fetches it. Germain Alfred, 18, rue Dieu. Tel: 01 57 91 28 73.
“Do you have a pay phone?”
The waiter looks at him in astonishment.
“A pay phone and the phone book? Not every day we get asked for that! There hasn’t been a pay phone here since the ’90s . . .”
“What about a landline? You must have a landline. I’ve got to make a call—just to another landline. It’s important.”
Ahmed’s tone and appearance disarm the achingly trendy barman, and he gestures to the telephone by the counter.
“Hello, Dr. Germain? This is Ahmed Taroudant. You remember . . . Can you fit me in? . . . In twenty minutes. Wonderful, I’ll be there.”
He replaces the handset, drinks his coffee and pays before crossing the road to take a seat at the edge of the canal. Dr. Germain’s deep voice had taken him back many years to a time when, session after session, he would relive his parents’ story, which he only knew from his mother Latifa’s well-worn accounts. Until he was thirteen, Ahmed’s life had been limited to one long, tragic saga. And then—nothing.
The story begins in 1970 with Latifa Mint Ibrahim’s arrival at the Faculty of Literature at the University of Rabat. She was the daughter of a well-known Sufi religious leader. Her father was a progressive. He wanted to set an example and pressed his beloved daughter to study and be independent. In those days, the regime was harsh, very harsh, but the people were not to be defeated. Far from it. Young people believed in their power to change the world and their country. Latifa felt giddy with freedom, and was naturally inclined toward the more radical, adventurous fringes of society. She was drawn to the Maoists of the all-new 23 Mars movement. Her heart swelled with notions of liberty and—even more so—equality. As a child she felt shackled by her status as daughter of the sheik, and would have willingly switched places with the black-skinned young girls who were her servants, but who were free to run wherever they pleased. On her return from school she would eat the dates with smen butter brought to her by Soueïdou, their young hartanya, a freed slave girl. But she only ever dreamed of milking the goats and churning butter in the old vessel made of animal hide. When M’barek, Soueïdou’s father, went up to gather dates from the tree in the garden, Latifa would imagine what it was like to be up there. As far as everyone was concerned, M’barek was a khadim, a slave, barely the quarter of a man. To her he was the very embodiment of freedom. Later, when her new Marxists friends spoke to her about Hegel and his “master-slave dialectic” she didn’t need them to spell it out. But what she never understood was why they deserted her when she fell in love with Hassan. They met at a music festival. Hassan was black, like most Gnawa musicians, the Gnawa being a people descended from slaves imported—as with so many others—from the banks of the Niger River, the place the Arabs called Bilad es-Sudan, the Land of the Blacks. For centuries, the black slave trade had been a lucrative business, amassing great fortunes for the most distinguished families from Fez and beyond, all pious Muslims unperturbed by the fact that the origin of their wealth lay in the trafficking of human beings, most of them fellow Muslims. The Gnawa had succeeded in preserving the memory of their ancestors’ music. Music that had the power to deliver the sick of the spirits that possessed them. One night—only once—Latifa had confided in Ahmed that Hassan, his father, sometimes had visions. Before he had even met her, he knew she would be coming and that their love would spell his ruin. It had been written, and it would have been unmanly of him to shy away from his destiny. This was her way of telling her son that she knew he had inherited the same gift. Then she picked up the thread of her story again . . . From the first moment Latifa laid eyes on Hassan, she had no doubt that this was the free man she had been waiting for her whole life. She lost any concept of the time and country in which she lived. Consumed by love, she never considered the risks and the price she would have to pay. As for Hassan, he loved her all the more strongly knowing that death lay in wait for him. One day, he disappeared. He never came to their tryst. This was common enough in the dark days of the Years of Lead. No one dared ask where or why he had gone. There, a Gnawa—an ’abid, a khadr—had loved a girl from a good family. Not often the secret police had the chance to get their hands on a case like that. Maybe it was a personal vendetta by an especially racist, jealous policeman? An intervention from Latifa’s father? Right away she got the feeling that she would not see her lover alive again, and she decided to flee the country, never to return. Her comrades were so wrapped up in their revolution that they saw her plight as irrelevant. Only Ahmed Taroudant—a closeted homosexual from a middle-class Agadir family—resolved to come to her aid. He took the sheik’s daughter into hiding, fixed her up with a fake passport, and they left the country together across the Algerian border to the south of the country, disguised as peasants. Back in that long-distant age, Arabs and blacks could travel freely between Africa and Europe. On arriving in France, the young Moroccan girl realized she was pregnant. She decided to keep the baby. Ahmed stayed with her until the birth, met the child who was to be named after him, the only friend she had ever had. He returned to his country, and she stopped hearing from him three years later.
Ahmed therefore inherited the first name and surname of his mother’s savior. As for his father, he knows only his first name, Hassan. Latifa never wanted to give him his full name. Nothing but the story. Always the same story. Two lives locked up in this one fucking story. How can you live after that without turning into some fictional character? From then on Latifa, moving from job to job, slowly began to lose her mind. First a job in a bookshop, then a florist’s, then a fruit-and-vegetable stall. Doctors, psychiatrists, hospital. Ahmed had to fend for himself from the age of fourteen. Latifa was either on antipsychotics or in the hospital, first at Maison Blanche, then at Pithiviers, where the doctors abandoned any hope of releasing her. It didn’t take long for him to prefer her being in the hospital. The social worker turned a blind eye: didn’t put him into care, sorted out the paperwork, and made sure he got his child benefits. He started work at sixteen. At eighteen he managed to get out of military service without even having to fake it. Mentally unstable. They didn’t admit him to a psychiatric ward. Just let him go like that. By the age of twenty he was a night watchman, happily removed from the world with his books and his Go board games. Human contact was limited to Al and two or three other friends. Sketchy love and sex life: every once in a while a girl would show some interest, and he would drift along with it until she got tired. For him, love was death. Ahmed assigned words to his mother’s silences: Oufkir, Tazmamart, Driss Basri. He learned about the different forms of torture. Whenever he thinks of his father, he sees a man who loved a woman and paid for it with his life, dying in agony. An endless loop runs through his head detailing every conceivable death, every conceivable torture. Water baths, parrot’s perches, electrodes, red-hot pokers. Plus the ones he’s read about in de Sade, and that photo of the slow-sliced man with the ecstatic expression that Georges Bataille obsessed over. This is what fills his head: the sound of screaming and ripping flesh.
Lots of images.
IMAGES
Ahmed stands up. Must be about time to head to Dr. Germain’s. Time for words.
8
At the Bunker, an uneasy Gomes is updating Kupferstein on what he’s found on Laura Vignola’s family in Niort. Since his arrival at the commissariat last October, fresh from completing his police training, the young lieutenant has been captivated by Rachel. He would do absolutely anything to make her smile. She uses her power over him sparingly, saving it only for when she really needs a hand. She doesn’t like the idea that the sorts of favors she asks of Gomes are down to the effect she has on him; they’re no different from what she’d naturally expect of any colleague. What’s more, she knows that the rest of the offi
cers at the local force—with the notable exception of Mercator—don’t like her and Hamelot. They think they’re only out for themselves—too cerebral, too unlike the others. Rachel was spoiling for this widespread animosity, which ultimately she couldn’t give a damn about, not to taint her young admirer. But then she did like the fact that she had this grip over Gomes, even if he wasn’t her type and his first name was Kevin; however hard she tried to put her class prejudices to one side, that was a mega deal-breaker. Anyhow, she’s playing it very carefully so that she can keep up the beguiling act for as long as possible. Gomes tugs nervously at his shirt collar. Without needing to look, she can sense the reason for his growing discomfort. She wheels her chair around regardless, if only to show her one true enemy at the commissariat that she’s not afraid of him.
At the far end of the open-plan office, old Lieutenant Meyer is swaying nonchalantly on his chair, watching them with a mocking air. He’s gnashing on some chewing gum, and pops a green bubble on his lips at the precise moment Rachel’s eyes meet his. Scum. The guy is scum. A single look and you need a shower. This is a policeman from the old school—fat but muscled, embittered, racist, macho, homophobic. And all the more anti-Semitic because everyone thinks he’s Jewish because of his Alsatian surname. Just by looking at him Rachel can feel herself turning into a guard dog, an anti-racist angel, a militant, a Charlie Hebdo–reading militant. She cannot stand it. Fine if Meyer does his Meyer thing: she couldn’t give a damn. But what she can’t accept is the fact that he is capable—with that craven look of his—of touching the side of her she is least comfortable with. She didn’t become a policewoman so she could be confused with the teacher in that film Entre les murs, going all soft on troublemakers. No—she became a policewoman to turn a vision into a reality; to embody an inanimate ideal, namely to uphold justice through the employment of force. As far as possible, Rachel strives to believe in that. She is lucky enough to take her orders from Mercator, who is far from an angel, though he does retain some notion of what it means to be a policeman—something along the lines of “we must protect society,” including against the powerful. The chief still has that bit of naïveté. If she had been stationed at the commissariat in the eighteenth, Enkell and Benamer would have left her with only one option: turning to the dark side.