Arab Jazz

by Karim Miské

  Tears. All of a sudden his cousin Mohamed enters the fold. “Nothing is more beautiful than the tears streaming down the cheeks of a Muslim in prayer. I pity the person who hasn’t felt that blessing! But fear not—I will pray that one day you will in turn be touched.” 6:01 a.m. The mood of the dream has changed. Ahmed is angry now. The Venetian lover was one thing: love always came after the tears. But that outburst from his cousin? How disillusioning! His subconscious adjusts to this imbalance, and pulls Rachel Kupferstein’s face out of the bag. She leans in to him slowly, brings her lips to his, and pushes her tongue between his teeth. It sends him into a frenzy. It’s been such a long time since he’s made love. So long he’s even stopped dreaming about it. Rachel undresses him, slowly at first, then more quickly, hastened by an overwhelming need to have him inside her. With one single movement he pulls down the zipper of his jeans and slides them off, relieved to be free of them and eager for the feeling of her wetness. Now for the best part: he is hard, she is ready—the contact. The best . . . Fssshhh! No more Rachel, no more dream. The young man wakes up feeling not so much frustrated as thankful he feels so alive. And overjoyed that he didn’t come in his sleep. He likes the idea of saving himself for her. He savors the desire, relishing the wait. The unknown.

  The digital clock reads 6:03. Saucepan, water, gas. Brown filter-holder onto Pyrex cafetière. Recycled filter. Three or four shakes of coffee straight from the package. Go on, let’s have a fifth! Boiling water. Ahmed has a ritual to avoid getting too many coffee grounds stuck to the side when tipping the water in. It involves pouring a slow trickle of hot water before the rest of it in order to form a compact, wet lump—like at the beach to make sandcastles—at the center of the white filter. It occurs to him that this is precisely how he goes about things on the toilet. Afterward, he hoses down the inside of the toilet bowl with his urine to dislodge any skid marks. The aim is to make it tidy, but he rarely succeeds, and often has to resort to the brush to finish the job. This act of pissing on his shit to dislodge it conjures up precisely the same obsessive pleasure he gets when he splashes water on the leftover coffee clinging to the upper rim of the filter. The parallel amuses him. All about keeping things neat.

  He pours himself a coffee and spreads some butter on a few crackers. By 6:30 a.m. breakfast is done, dishes washed, and shower taken. Wearing the same jeans as the day before, a white V-neck T-shirt, and blue cotton socks, he is sitting on the hessian carpet with his back to the wall. All that stuff about the coffee and the excrement has left him feeling clearer, lighter—his mind freer. Then images and faces come flooding in. Moktar, Sam. The barber’s shop is at the heart of the matter. Another face is playing dead there at the very edge of his consciousness, just where it had frozen during his trance after the discovery of Laura’s body. He can sense it twitching imperceptibly—slowly, like a mollusk, a crustacean, a starfish—as if it were moving toward a flicker of light between the shadows of two rocks in a stretch of calm water. He mustn’t force this one. He mustn’t send it scuttling away for good.

  Ahmed comes back to Moktar, which in turn makes him think of that little group, 75-Zorro-19. He remembers when they started out in the neighborhood. Mourad, Alpha, Moktar and Ruben . . . Sam’s nephew! That’s the link between Moktar and the barber. The group has reformed and it’s got something to do with Laura’s death. He remembers the air hostess’s idle chitchat, which he paid little attention to. Something about Ruben’s little sister. She was under masses of pressure from her family. Laura was pushing her to stand up to them. Then all of a sudden she vanished and no one knew where she’d gone. But Laura, having been so concerned about Rébecca’s situation, had seemed astonishingly relaxed about her disappearance, to the extent that she’d stopped talking about her. How can he find out what happened? Interrogate her girlfriends, whose names he can’t even remember? He checks his watch. 7:00 a.m. He has to catch the Métro to get to Dr. Germain’s on time.

  Thirty-five minutes later and he’s sitting in the waiting room. He had to run through the station corridors to avoid being late. Running to be on time. Feels like another life. Métro, rushing, punctuality. Now it’s him waiting for Dr. Germain. Which irritates him until he realizes he is still out of breath and that he could do with the rest. The wait is part of the process, part of the well-known need to “work on oneself.” Free of this little bristle of anger, Ahmed tunes in to the sounds. The pipes feeding water to the taps and then sending it back to the sewers. The purring of an extractor fan that masks both the weird noises and the delicious smells emanating from the coffee machine. Dr. Germain must have struggled to get out of bed, and considered a cup of coffee necessary prior to seeing his first patient, who happened to be closely linked to two murders. Ahmed smiles, stretches out his legs and drifts off. Thirty seconds later the door opens, he gets to his feet, shakes the outstretched hand, walks into the consulting room, and lies down. There is a eucalyptus-scented paper handkerchief on the cushion for his head. He pictures the doctor—bathing in the aura of his lofty discipline, his knowledge of the complete works of Freud and the nineteen volumes of Lacan’s seminars—patting down the couch to get rid of any imprint left by the last patient before changing the paper towel. Something a bit peep-showy about the tissue—something rather intimate, rather sexual. Same with the Dalí print, the painting with Gala’s naked breast that hangs above the couch.

  The first time he had sat opposite Dr. Germain—it took him until the fifth session to lie down—Ahmed had been struck by the picture’s energy, and had felt concern for its creator. Then he did some research and found out that the painter had been a virgin when he met Gala. He studies the picture in silence. Dr. Germain starts off.

  “So, where were . . .”

  “It’s about omnipotence, that picture. Gala the older woman, the initiator. The one who knows.”

  “The powerful woman?”

  “Yes, the powerful woman. What’s a man meant to do when faced with her?”

  “Well, let’s consider him . . . What’s he doing?”

  “He’s watching her, painting her . . . He’s acting, doing something about her. And she expects that. She watches him do it. There’s always something to do . . .”

  Silence.

  “Something to do? Yes . . .”

  “Me . . . I don’t paint, right. I don’t do anything. Women have never hung around because I’ve always been too passive, too inactive. Waiting . . . Because deep down I’ve always been alone, caught between me and myself and my singleton ways. You know this morning I realized that I like making things tidy with my shits as well as my coffee.”

  Ahmed falls quiet again. The doctor draws out the pause. His breathing slows down, making his patient wonder if he’s fallen asleep. So he carries on talking, saying the first thing that pops into his head, just to wake him up. Just so that he doesn’t fall asleep too. Nodding out on the psychiatrist’s couch!

  “Apart from that, there’s a killer haunting me inside my head, but I’m still too scared to look him in the eye. So I keep a distance between the dragging hours of these sessions and my overbearing need to act.”

  “But this need to act . . . Is it not at work on some level? It’s producing something, surely? If only because it led to your return . . .”

  “Yes, my return: my return here; my return to life. I’ve got to do something, open my eyes; not stay still. I’ve got to do lots of things. This murder I saw . . . I’m too scared to tell you because I’ll see it all over again. As if by seeing it—even in my head—I’m starting to face up to it, making myself vulnerable, you see.”

  Silence.

  “This is a killer we’re talking about. A predator, a manhunter. Someone who enjoys killing, who enjoys making people suffer.”

  “Yes . . .”

  “Like . . . Like the people who killed my father . . .”

  “Yes . . .”

  “I’ve got to look him straight in the eye, square on. No more of these blurred images. In the eye, I’
ve got to look evil in the eye . . .”

  “Yes . . .”

  “I’m going to tell you now what I couldn’t tell you before. The reason I’m here. And before that, the reason I was locked up at Maison Blanche. That murder, the one I saw, of that girl . . . Emma . . .”

  “Emma. Go on . . .”

  “I’ll tell you like we tell anything that’s happened to us. Like when you’ve witnessed an accident, yeah . . . Okay . . . I was at the furniture warehouse in the industrial estate in Aulnay-sous-Bois. My shift started at 8:00 p.m., when the other employees were finishing for the day. Around 9:00 p.m. I went to go and heat up a Tupperware of frozen lasagna. Half an hour later I switched on my PC to play Go against the computer. It won twice in a row. At about 11:00, as I was about to win the third game, I heard a noise at the other end of the building. That happened a lot: the odd creak, a bit of furniture falling over, a mouse nibbling a plastic cover . . . So I went to check it out to put my mind to rest, not overly worried and not thinking I needed to call it in. One thing’s for sure, I didn’t take my cell. I must have known what was coming instinctively, because I didn’t make a sound as I tiptoed down the aisles, and my flashlight was off. I knew the warehouse like the back of my hand, don’t forget. I could hear the noise more clearly, coming from an area near a side door. It definitely wasn’t a mouse, no doubt about it: a rhythmic plastic rustling; panting breaths. I kept going . . . Thought I’d let them finish up, plus I wanted to get a look. There was a stool that meant I could watch without being seen. A couple were having sex on a cream display sofa that was wrapped in a stiff cover. But the woman—about thirty, chestnut-brown hair, green eyes lined with Kohl shadow—had been gagged with beige duct tape, her eyes wide open with terror. Given the position of her arms, her hands must have been tied behind her back. As for the man, I only saw the back of his head: strong shoulders like a furniture mover, long blond hair like some guitarist from a heavy metal band, and his enormous hands around her neck. All of a sudden, he grunted and he strangled her. Right then, at the exact same time, she noticed me and she died. I heard a bone break. The whole thing lasted about fifteen seconds, you know, the scene I’d had the misfortune to see. I ducked down and listened. The sounds charted the killer’s movements. He straightened his pants with a ‘Huh!’ echoing from deep in his stomach, hoisted the girl onto his shoulder like a sack of cement, and walked out heavily. The door slammed shut and the footsteps became more distant. I stayed slumped on the stool for a good three minutes, feeling desolate. I heard the faint sound of an engine starting and a car pulling away. Diesel. Still convinced he was a taxi driver. And even though I didn’t see his face, I’m sure I’d recognize him if by some cruel twist of fate, for me or for him, I came across him again. There you have it. Not the smallest trace of anything on the sofa. That plastic was solid as fuck. Like nothing had happened. ‘I didn’t see anything at Aulnay-sous-Bois.’ So I did nothing. And I mean total ‘nonaction’, just not in a Zen way! That night I couldn’t sleep. Same for the following nights. The girl’s expression had gotten into my head, and it’s never left. I was responsible for her death. And do you know what I thought of at that exact moment? Gainsbourg, ‘Melody Nelson’. I blew it trying to lose my virginity when ‘Melody Nelson’ was playing. The girl was lying there, up for it, I was fingering her. And I didn’t even take her clothes off. I had no idea what to do. After a bit, fed up with the wait, she got up and she was on her way. It took me another two years after that . . .”

  “Melody . . .”

  “Yeah, exactly. Melody . . .”

  “Shall we talk about this next time?”

  Ahmed sits up, stays at the edge of the couch, his mind all over the place, like after a dream. Next time . . . Yeah . . .

  “I’ve had a think . . . Since you’ve got nothing to your name other than your disability benefit, what would you say to twenty dollars per session, two sessions a week?”

  “Look, I’ll have to do my accounts, but I don’t reckon I can manage that.”

  “Maybe you could find a way of managing it . . .”

  Ahmed considers it, saying nothing.

  “Come on Monday morning at 8:30 a.m. That’ll give you some time to think it through.”

  Handshake. Cut.

  17

  It’s already 9:30 a.m. Jean arrives at the office in astonishingly good spirits. After his Tsingtao he’d gone home. Back to one of the redbrick social housing projects that hem in Paris. His ruinous, morbid neighborhood with its stench of self-loathing and hatred of others had greeted him with a sense of suffocation. As he entered his one-bedroom apartment, the need to move out welled up with renewed vigor. A liberating feeling—anxiety maybe?—that transformed into affirmative action: first thing in the morning he would talk to Rachel, and she would put him in touch with an ex of hers, a formidable real estate agent. This decision had calmed him down so much that he slept like a baby under the watchful eye of happy parents. When he woke, his head clear, he remembered that he had a 75-Zorro-19 mixtape from the year 2000. On the back of the cover there was an oblique reference to Laura’s girlfriends. He still had the title song on his old MP3 player.

  He has a meeting with Dr. Germain at 6:30 p.m. How is he going to keep himself busy until then? Go and see Ahmed again? Had Laura’s two friends—the black girl and the Arab—called Rachel back? Had they met up? No texts through this morning. Not that that means anything. Let’s start with a coffee . . . Nice and simple—just need to press a button. If Rachel isn’t in by 10:00 a.m. he’ll call her. Mercator, back turned, is collecting the change from his espresso.

  “Small with sugar, Hamelot?”

  “Yes, boss, as ever.”

  Noise, coffee, sugar, stirrer. Mercator takes the two coffees in their plastic cups and heads down the corridor toward his office. Jean follows him. They sit down opposite each other. The desk is clean and tidy, except for a virgin pad of Clairefontaine “C.”

  “I know that you have dived head first into this investigation. That’s what I was hoping. Full immersion in the folly of religion. In the great folly of the credulous. Or rather of those who clog up their depths, their inner space, with the concrete of certainty. Sealed up and leveled off, we can go on with life. Tout va bien, as Godard said. Aside from that I’ve got nothing to say: you and Kupferstein know what to do and how to do it. There is, however, a little something that’s been bothering me all morning. A phone call from the eighteenth. My dear colleague, Commissaire Frédéric Enkell, told me that he’d had nothing back from his informants regarding the phone booth on rue Ordener. His exact words were: ‘No, no Mercator. Nobody saw a thing, I assure you.’ At the time noted, nobody saw anyone make a call from there. My question is why not? Of course there’s no reason why his rats would be on the lookout all the time, but I still got the feeling he was lying. Amazing how easy it was to tell he was lying! And that, Hamelot, is because he doesn’t give two shits about lying to me. I’m guessing he thinks I have to believe him on some grounds of kinship. A caste mentality. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but people beyond a certain position of power tend to lie an awful lot. As if shameless lying is a perk of the job. It turns them on, if you will. In our case, this lie is worth its weight in gold. It gives us a lead. One to follow with the utmost discretion. You don’t happen to know a trustworthy officer over there?”

  “No, Commissaire. Unfortunately, the commissariat in the eighteenth is murky to the core. Benamer is still Enkell’s right-hand man, is he not?”

  Mercator looks up, visibly lost in his own meandering thoughts. The lieutenant thinks his superior has started to meditate, but then he hears his voice.

  “Do you remember Van Holden?”

  “Your predecessor?”

  “Yes. He’s heading up internal affairs at the IGPN. Been there two years. It was him who toppled the commissaire divisionnaire in Saint-Denis. You know, the guy who covered for that depraved, cretinous gang of racketeering, prostitute-raping policemen in porte de la
Chapelle. Van Holden took his time and he nailed all of them. Now Enkell . . . Enkell’s no fool. Neither is Benamer. Evil exists, Hamelot, and sometimes it gets itself together. You understand evil, Hamelot?”

  His words are now weaving into the fabric of his dreams.

  “Enkell . . . ‘Nobody saw a thing, I assure you . . .’ Beneath those words, beneath that little ‘I assure you’ afterthought, there lingered a stench of death . . .”

  Mercator falls silent. His eyes peel away from the wall where moments before vivid shapes had been dancing, shapes invisible to mere mortals. They bypass his subordinate and become engrossed in a document. At the corner of the immaculate desk the two plastic cups are still steaming.

  “Don’t forget your coffee,” he says without looking up.

  Jean heads back to his office in contemplative mood, stirring his beverage robotically. As the commissaire’s words etch themselves into him, he becomes aware of the inhumane nature of this work factory. Like some Ikea showroom. He remembers one of Rachel’s words.

  “Ouphilanthropon. The ‘nonhuman’, according to Aristotle. That which is opposed to man.”

  Like some mathematical concept, like zero and infinity. 1 ÷ ∞ = 0. And conversely. He’s got to get out, quick. Got to reestablish contact with his own kind. In the toilets he ditches his untouched cup on top of the electric hand dryer, pisses, stares at the basin as though it were one of Duchamp’s readymades, devoid of any function, and exits wiping his hands on the back pockets of his jeans. Telephone.