by Karim Miské
He never saw her again. The conversation came flooding back to him. He was lost—totally lost. He desperately wanted to scream, to cry. Not in the street, though. And screaming, that would be fine; but crying, letting the tears flow . . . What was that like?
He stops abruptly. He feels distraught. Arts et Métiers. What am I doing here? On rue au Maire there are some old-style Chinese restaurants. Real country bumpkin clientele. Go on then, let’s see if one is still open! A Tsingtao and some lychees—something to mellow him out. He passes Tango—has some memory of an Afro-Caribbean club, from when he first arrived in Paris. It was a nightmare. He hadn’t been able to dance and had to watch his girlfriend grinding up against hot, gyrating West Indian guys. He looks up instinctively. A rectangular screen with flashing red lights reads: “Gay and Lesbian Club.” That does it. He flops against the side of a building. He feels like his head might explode. Boom! Splinters of skull everywhere; brain smeared all over the gray wall . . . He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. He remembers the tips on the leaflet about relaxation that Léna gave him one day when he was stressed. He holds the air in his lungs and slowly counts to five, then breathes out. Slowly, slowly. He repeats the drill three times. When he comes to, a blond uniformed policewoman with blue eyes is looking at him—strangely, with the same kind of blue eyes as the European garbage collectors employed by the city council in Paris. The police car is parked on the corner by a tabac where her colleagues have gone to get their provisions.
“Everything alright, monsieur?”
Jean smiles at her, employing one of his many deceptive grins, and takes out his ID.
“Yeah I’m fine, thanks. Bit of a rough day, that’s all.”
“Oh, Lieutenant, you’re one of us! Lucky you! I’m desperate to take the exam to get to your level, but with my hours, and with work being so tiring, I’ve never gotten around to it. Have a good night, Lieutenant! Go and rest if it’s been a tough day . . .”
“Thank you, Officer. Good night to you too.”
She moves on. Jean peels himself away from the wall and takes a couple of steps before turning around and shouting out to the young uniformed policewoman.
“Hey! Mademoiselle!”
She comes back toward him, stopping half a yard away.
“Yes?”
“Don’t lose hope! If you really, really want it, that is. Don’t lose hope!”
There is a thinly veiled violence in his voice. It is bristling down his entire body. Without giving her any time to respond, Jean wheels around suddenly. Speechless, she watches him fade into the night, wondering whether becoming a lieutenant is in fact all it’s cracked up to be. She heads back to her fellow patrol officers. At least with them she can have a bit of a laugh!
Jean really needs that beer. He falls into the first dive he comes across. No decoration whatsoever, except the obligatory shrine comprising a chubby Buddha and red lighting. Gouged wooden tables and cafeteria chairs. No way! They must’ve scrounged these off the local school! he thinks to himself. He can scarcely believe his eyes, four Chinese men are playing mah-jong. As if they’d never left Macau. The cliché strikes him with a powerful sense of unreality. It actually releases some of his tension. He’s somewhere else; it’s okay. Concentrating very hard, the players don’t pay the white policeman the slightest attention. A young woman in a dark skirt emerges from the storeroom, her flip-flops clacking on the black-and-white concrete floor. She looks at him for a moment before speaking.
“Yes, sir, what would you like?”
To take you from behind back there in the storeroom—you pushed up against the beer crates and me fucking you up the ass. Not dry, oh no. I want to work it in with your saliva on my fingers.
“A Chinese beer, please. A large one. And some prawn crackers.”
“Take a seat, sir.”
The well-rehearsed smile can’t conceal an old, jaded soul, one who’d seen it all before she’d even been born. Jean sits down. So many demons. He spends his life permanently ricocheting between unfulfilled impulses and pangs of guilt. Yet right now he can feel a deep-rooted violence welling up inside. He hadn’t noticed it when he spoke to the policewoman minutes earlier. But that image, those words . . . They’d been so clear in his head, and they spelled something different. Something that can’t just be put down to tiredness or stress. Laura’s murder seems to have opened a very deep fault line, bringing him closer to the magma within, the lava of inner confusion. The elaborate crime scene, the potency of the imagery created by the killer . . . It was all speaking directly to his unconscious mind. The waitress brings over his beer and the crackers in their see-through packet. He thanks her and pours the beer himself, tipping the glass to keep the froth to a minimum. Slowly, slowly. That ritual calms him down. Should he start with the beer or the crackers? In a restaurant he’d usually have a French fry before attacking his steak. Never go straight for the main event. He forces himself to drink, leaving the packet unopened. Vaffanculo! Go fuck yourself, you bastard! Stop giving me shit! With a sigh Jean leans back in his chair and takes a long gulp, his eyes half-closed. Violence. His boyhood cruelty comes back to him. Toasting ants. The time he beat the hell out of a cat he had trapped in a cemetery with his friend Jérémie simply to let off steam. All reasoning had been shot to pieces. A flash. White light. Jean had never gone as far as taking heroin, but this is how he imagined the high. Kick the shit out of it. Kick it! Kick it!
SMASH IT BATTER IT
DESTROY THE FUCKING LITTLE CAT
WIPE IT OUT FUCK IT UP
KILL THE FUCKER
LET THE EARTH FINALLY BE RID OF ITS
SHITTY PRESENCE
That was the end of obedient little Jean. The kind boy who never caused a stir, who preferred to shut himself in his room, jerking off in shameful silence. He stopped there, dead. Killed in action. A deed, a movement, repeated throughout eternity, for centuries and centuries. Oh, shit!
Then, suddenly, the cat scratched. It startled Jérémie and he let go of it. He stared at Jean. The cat scurried away. “Y-y-y-y-y-you were killing it,” his friend stammered, before getting up and running off. Jean sat down on the mossy gray cement tomb of Pierre Le Bouennec (1903–1971). He looked at his hands, streaked with red, and touched his neck where he could feel droplets of blood. Back to the house. The nurse, his mother, tended to him without asking any questions. She had a sense for these things. Silence was her weapon of choice, along with her all-knowing eyes. Each silence strengthening her grip on Jean. The episode with the cat marked the end of his sadistic phase. From then on he took it out on himself. In his head, for the most part. But he did hurt himself a lot of the time: scrapes, burns, bruises of various sorts. Each time his mother would soothe him without uttering a single word.
He has never told anyone about this. Maybe if he’d met Léna later on? They were only seventeen when they started going out in Saint-Pol-de-Léon. Not the age for talking. More recently he’d let slip the odd snippet in confidence. Aware of the almost palpable pain he was in, she had advised him to start seeing a therapist. She’d been in psychoanalysis herself for four years and felt better for it. They both came from Brittany and shared the same Catholic, commie heritage (they’d met at the local Jeunesse communiste center), and she reckoned that the treatment she had been through would not do her policeman comrade any harm.
“You know, Jean, Freud was a Jew. He lived in a Catholic country and expressed hypercritical views toward religion in general—his and ours in particular. And he never believed in communism. He knew human beings too well to subscribe to a utopian ideology. The only thing that will lighten things up is focusing on your relationship with your mother. You’ve only got to read Lacan and watch von Trier’s Festen again to understand how vital it is to sort out mommy issues. In Paris, most psychiatrists are Lacanians anyway! No, I assure you, this can only do you good! Sorry, I shouldn’t be talking to you like this. Psychoanalysis—just like therapy—all depends on the patient and his desire to be t
here. Fuck, I sound so damn serious!? Listen to me! No, forget what I said . . . We were going to have another bottle of beer, weren’t we?”
Jean looks around him. He’s still in the tacky Chinese restaurant. The old guys are packing up their game of mah-jong. The waitress is leaning on the bar, looking at him but not hurrying him. It’s time. He’s finished his Tsingtao without even realizing. He stands up, pays, and grabs his unopened crackers. He feels calmer. Crisis averted. A crack has opened inside him, and he can’t let it close by itself.
13
Ahmed decided against rolling a joint. He stashed the weed that Al gave him in the breast pocket of a clean pajama top. Even if he is wary of his paranoia, he can’t resist the urge to get his brain whirring and make some sense of his encounter with Moktar. He’s not really one for conspiracies or for coincidences. It’s been four years since Moktar last said a word to him. When they cross in the street they avoid each other: no words, but no aggression either. They had been at Maison Blanche at the same time, though not for the same reasons. They weren’t friends. One of their arguments would have boiled over if a nurse hadn’t interrupted. From then on they made a tacit agreement to stay out of each other’s way. Ahmed had become friends with the nurse, Rita, a big red-headed lady. Another redhead! During one of their conversations she had spilled the beans about Moktar’s diagnosis: degenerative paranoid psychosis. Completely incurable. Inevitably his illness had embedded itself into the spirit of the times. It was at Maison Blanche that he began to talk about God. The time spent in the bled had sown the seed. A vision of the crime starts to form in Ahmed’s mind. Very vague; imprecise. He has to see the killer’s face again. For that he must sleep. But what about that joint? It was too early. Not inside the apartment. For a second he feels tempted to call up Rachel: “Hi, it’s Ahmed. I was just thinking . . . I’ve got some good shit from Thailand—how about we carry on that chat about Ellroy?” A short laugh. He takes in a deep breath of love and fresh air, then thinks back to Moktar. The psychotic Salafist has got to be part of the picture, but he’s not the killer. He can feel it, somewhere in the corner of his mind. “Halouf-eating bastard.” It’s bonkers—why are they so hung up on all that? The pure, the impure . . . He’d never really understood it. Got to be said that Latifa was totally relaxed toward all that. She let him eat and drink anything in the house. He’d never asked his few girlfriends about when their periods were due . . . Come to think of it, he really liked the taste of blood. “The taste of blood?” He repeats the words to himself, his inner voice strangely reminiscent of Dr. Germain’s. Fuck, you’ve got to be kidding—now I’ve got a shrink in my head! The thought irritates Ahmed a bit, before he realizes that he’s a bit hungry. He decides to make a special offering to Moktar by tucking into some ham tortellini. Saucepan, water, heat. Quickly resists the sudden urge to plunge his head into the boiling water. Barilla tortellini—eleven minutes. Splash of olive oil, salt, pepper. No parmesan. As he sits down, he spots Mohamed’s letter. He puts it to one side for later. For once he eats slowly, managing not to burn his tongue.
Slouched on the futon, back against an Ikea Gosa Gott pillow—twenty-five inches by twenty-five—Ahmed is straining his ears. He often does this: to forget, to escape his head. He picks up on the muffled noises from all around the poorly soundproofed building. Most of the time, like tonight, it’s the television. He can’t bear it when the news is on: violence piercing him through the walls, even if he can’t decipher the words. The rhythm, the frequency, the tone . . . All of it is aggressive, deceitful. Ads are too shouty. No, what he likes is the anesthetizing effect of the dubbed French versions of American series. He could never bear a television in his own place, but the dull sound of the programs through the cheap concrete . . . It’s like popping a Valium. Which is lucky, as he’s been off that for a while now; insomnia and alcohol have to be better than an addiction to prescription drugs. He also rejoices in silence when his neighbor puts TF1 or M6 on the TV. As he listens he feels the stress easing gently. Fffffoooooooo, vvvooooshhhh, bzzzzzzzzzisssssh, ooooohhhhhhhh. Eyes shut. No need to go anywhere. Just stay put. Then he opens them and stares at the crack in the white ceiling. Opens his eyes wide. Stays still. Five more minutes.
Up he gets, slowly, slowly. He goes back to the table and drinks the untouched glass of water. Taking hold of the letter, he sits down on the orange folding chair, grabs a sharp knife, and opens the envelope. It starts with the only Arabic words he’s able to read: Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim, “In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful.” The rest is mainly in French:
Dear cousin,
Alhamdulillah, my year at university is over and I am on vacation. So I am writing you this little note to let you know that I am coming to spend the summer with you in Paris. I hope you do not mind? Soon, then, we will have the joy of seeing each other again. I’ll leave it there, dear cousin, but not before taking the opportunity to thank you as ever for welcoming me like a brother.
May God bless you. See you soon, inshallah . . .
Mohamed.
Deep in thought, Ahmed puts the letter down. Mohamed is coming back. Strangely he’s excited about seeing him, even if sharing living space with anyone for four months fills him with dread. And even if there was a bit too much of all the bismillah, alhamdulillah, inshallah, and may God bless you nonsense in the letter. Especially after the thing with Moktar this evening. Some John Lydon lyrics pop into his head. “Religion”: one of the songs he knows by heart. The first verse cuts right to the chase: God and lies; stained-glass windows and hypocrites. Still sitting down, Ahmed hums the bass line. Toodoodoodoo doodoo, toodoodoodoo doodoo, then that guitar riff that never lets up. Tananana nananana tananana nananana, tananana nananana tananana nananana. It’s in his head now, just like it was when he was fifteen and discovered PiL through this little tune, not long after he’d first heard “Sympathy for the Devil.” After that, he feels stable, immune from Moktar’s bullshit. Now he’s on his feet, singing at the top of his voice, body and voice disjointed.
Ahhh! Nothing like a bit of blasphemy. Blasphemy and dancing. Ahmed feels lighter immediately. Strange how Islam has been such a burden on him despite the fact his mother never taught him about it nor imposed it on him in any way. Not that she’d have been able to anyway . . .
He stretches out on his bed and calmly, unhurriedly reflects on what he’s got: Moktar, his “halouf” insult, and the pork joint. No, no, no! Not a coincidence. He closes his eyes and lets himself drift off. The strange expression worn this morning by Sam, the Jewish barber, becomes superimposed onto the face of the black Salafist. He unpicks the scene with Moktar in slow motion. He walks past him, turns back, notices he’s gone. Moktar should have gotten as far as the fruit and veg shop, just after the barber’s. So he could have entered either no. 15 or Sam’s. He’s a local guy—nothing to say he doesn’t have friends or family living at no. 15. But no. A shiver runs down his spine—the paranoiac Soninké went to Sam’s. And it doesn’t seem likely that it was for a haircut . . . What could this mean? Even though he can’t figure out their motives, Ahmed does know what’s going to happen: they’ll wait for their chance to pin the blame on him by saying something to the police. Maybe not directly, but in passing—perhaps via Fernanda, or by sending an anonymous letter. He’s got to find a way to get ahead of them. Anticipation and reaction. He’s got to find something—a lead, anything—before he sees Rachel and Jean again. The fact he’s good at playing the fool will work to his advantage. The most important thing is they don’t realize he’s awoken from his slumber! Ahmed the space cadet has got to stay in character: Monsieur Paul, Franprix, the baker’s. And tomorrow at around 10:00 a.m., when he gets back from the shrink, he’ll go for a haircut at Sam’s. Been two months anyway—well overdue. Time to take off the thinking cap. Time to sleep. To sleep and dream.
11:00 p.m.
14
The man is alone in the gloomy meeting room, the weak light coming from the street lamp on the pave
ment opposite. He is sitting stock-still in the black office chair, leaning forward with his head in his hands. On the table in front of him, his Sagem cell starts vibrating. He looks up and stares at the telephone, his eyes wild. Unlisted number. He picks up on the eighth ring.
“Hello . . .”
“Hi, it’s me, Susan.”
After a short hesitation he answers in strongly accented English.
“Hi, Susan.”
“I’ve got a surprise for you . . .”
“A surprise?”
“I’m going to be in Paris this weekend. Isn’t that great?”
“But . . .”
“Don’t worry! James has taken care of everything. You’ll have a perfect excuse for your wife.”
“I can’t leave now, Susan!”
“Tomorrow you’ll receive travel instructions from the Center. I’ll be waiting for you at the Concorde Lafayette Hotel, room 1727. Saturday at 3:00 p.m. Ohhh, I’m so excited! Please tell me you can’t wait to see me!”
He tries to steady his voice but can’t stop it from cracking.
“It will be a pleasure, Susan, of course.”
Susan hangs up with a kiss. He returns the telephone to its place and resumes his afflicted stance.
*
In a telephone booth, a man sparks up his lighter to make out an 800 number written on a piece of paper. He dials, listens to the recorded instructions read out by a female voice, then enters a Paris number followed by the hash key. After the fourth ring a man picks up; it’s one of those old telephones with a gray receiver and ’80s-style keypad. He’s sitting in front of a mirror in the half-light smoking a Café Crème. He keeps on smoking and leaves it to the other guy to get the ball rolling.