Arab Jazz

by Karim Miské

  Bintou, her eyes welling up with tears, takes his hand and squeezes it with all her strength.

  “Alpha, you’ve got to tell us everything. Afterward we’ll go to the police together. And then Laura will leave you in peace because you’ll have done the right thing.”

  “The right thing . . .”

  Boys Don’t Cry. Alpha continues, visibly distressed.

  “Nothing will ever be right again. Never. We let it happen. We listened to them and then we left. Like cowards.”

  Emptiness. Mourad’s eyes finally stop staring at his tea and catch sight of a familiar silhouette entering the kebab house. He shuts them for half a second as a greeting before carrying on as the new arrival goes to the counter and greets Onur.

  “Haqiqi insisted we went to the meeting. He needed us to sort out something important. Moktar explained that, as a one-off, we’d be working with Jews. We thought that was weird, but at the time we trusted him. He’d often counted on us for little missions, as he called them: handing out leaflets outside the mosques in Paris or Évry, burning DVDs, simple stuff that made us feel important, made us feel we were bringing about the Ummah. Might sound stupid, but we really believed it. And we believed in Moktar. He was our childhood friend, but since his journey to the bled he seemed inspired, like he was walking with God: and by following him, we felt that we were on the right path too. Moktar explained that there was a dangerous woman living among us. Laura had looked at him several times. It was Haqiqi who wised him up about it; reminded him it was those kinds of look that nearly made him lose his way in his old life. He said that she got kicks from turning on all the true believers in the neighborhood. That made him think that she had been sent by Shaytan to unsettle our community. At that point, me and Alpha looked at each other. Sam noticed, and so did the weird dude, who hadn’t come out with a single word but who listened to everything we said, monitoring our every movement. Moktar was in full flow and didn’t notice anything. Two nights earlier, Haqiqi had had an amazing, troubling dream which took place in Medina at the time of the Prophet. Some horny woman was walking down a street turning on all the men. She went past the group of first believers—the holy ancestors—who were getting ready to pray. The sun was setting to their right, in the west. Then she committed a grave error: she revealed herself to them with her head, arms, and chest uncovered. But the pure-hearted had raised their hands and closed their eyes, and uttered the holy words Allahu Akbar. The next second the woman disappeared. Because the sun was setting in the west, the event happened before the Prophet had instructed them to turn toward Mecca rather than Jerusalem to pray. For Haqiqi, the meaning was clear: however wacky it might seem, we needed to ask the Jews for help to find out what to do with this impure woman.”

  “And that’s when I turned up.”

  Surprised at the interruption, the girls swing around to see Ruben standing there in jeans and a T-shirt, his sidelocks half let down, a glass of tea in his hand.

  “Right when Sam took the floor to explain that Imam Haqiqi and Rabbi Seror had decided to act together to protect their respective communities from this depraved woman. I know Sam well—he’s my uncle. A doofus who thinks he’s smart. As for Seror and Haqiqi, they were sure we’d all agree to rein Laura in, our sisters’ best friend. She was the one, they thought, who prevented us from keeping you girls under control. They saw us as good little soldiers, and they weren’t wrong. But they overestimated the grip they had on us when they tried to get us to kidnap Laura. I’m not sure how, but they’d gotten their hands on her flight schedule, and they asked us to intercept her at midnight between the Métro station and her apartment. Then we had to take her in a van to some warehouse beyond the périphérique where Moktar and the other guy would be waiting. It was all supposed to be about scaring her, making her move away from the neighborhood, and making her leave the faithful, and our sisters, in peace. All three of us looked at each other for the first time in four or five years and it was like we’d just woken up from a bad dream. Like in the movies, when the hero is released from the witch’s spell. It was when Sam used the words ‘the believers’: it didn’t ring true. All of a sudden we realized that it sounded just as false coming from the mouths of our leaders, the people we’d been following for so many years. We looked at each other and we replied as one that we were refusing to do it; we weren’t going to be part of it. Moktar was about to insist, but Sam realized there was no point. Then the other guy—the one who hadn’t said a word—came out of the shadows. He smiled at us and threatened us by running his thumb across his throat. Without saying a word. That’s the truth. We were scared. If we’d gone to the police when we left Sam’s, Laura would still be alive.”

  Aïcha and Bintou stare at Ruben wide-eyed. Then at Alpha, then at Mourad. They saw the killer. They could have prevented Laura’s death. The girls begin to cry. The boys stay quiet as they are forced to face up to themselves. To their passivity. To the unforgivable.

  THE CRIME

  THEIR CRIME

  Several minutes later and the silence becomes unbearable.

  “What do we do now?” Alpha asks in a whisper. “Go and see the police?”

  Bintou dries her tears with a paper napkin.

  “Soon. Before, you’ve got to talk to us.”

  With a hesitant motion she goes to squeeze her brother’s hand again.

  “You’ve got to tell us about you. How did you get like this? What made you become the way you did?”

  “It’s a long story. You know a bit about the start: four kids play superheroes in the schoolyard, discover rap at secondary school, become local celebs, and then, a few years later, fall out over standard girl problems.”

  “Not sure ‘standard’ is the word.”

  Ruben finally sits down and continues.

  “You remember the romance between Moktar and Anna? When his parents banned him from seeing her, Moktar smashed up the whole house. He ended up in Sainte-Anne; later on, his father decided to send him to the bled. Anna was totally devastated. One day, I bumped into her outside the Picard on boulevard Magenta. She was like a sleepwalker. We went for a coffee. She begged me to talk to Moktar when he got back. We saw each other again quite a few times over the summer. I promised to do what I could. When Moktar came back, he had changed inside. There was something completely different about him. A power, an aura. It was fascinating and disturbing. When I spoke to him about Anna, he asked me if I had joined the side of Shaytan. Mourad and Alpha were there. They tried to defuse the situation, to laugh it off, but Moktar’s words affected them in a way that I didn’t realize at the time. Feeling alone and sad, I went to tell Anna that there was no hope. That’s the day it happened between me and her. After, it was too heavy for me to bear, so I went to tell Moktar to his face.”

  He stops, drinks a mouthful of tea. Mourad takes the story from there.

  “That day, it was just us at Moktar’s. The TV was on: music videos on M6, I think. When Ruben fessed up about what had happened between him and Anna, Moktar went ballistic. He started reciting verses from the Koran that he’d learned in the bled, got up and walked straight to Ruben, who pulled back to the front door. Me and Alpha held him off and shouted at Ruben to get the hell out of there, fast. We managed to get Moktar back in his seat, but he was still reciting, chanting. We stayed there until his father got back. The following day, he was admitted to Maison Blanche. We cut ties with Ruben because we were shocked he’d slept with Anna. And we thought it was his fault that Moktar had gone back to hospital. We went to Maison Blanche twice. That was where we really fell under his spell. He was like a holy man, and most of the other patients listened to him. He spoke of the bled, of the marabouts. He explained how over there people lived in purity, in the truth of Islam. I don’t know . . . It was like since his journey he’d found the thing we’d been missing. The magic thing. When he got out, we followed him to Haqiqi’s prayer room, where we became completely immersed in their world. They spoke about the time of the Prophet,
about the holy ancestors. About the path to follow.”

  Ruben cuts him off.

  “It didn’t last with Anna. And I was left abandoned by all. I started thinking about me, myself. What was most important to me: hip-hop or Judaism? Then when my father left and my mother started going along to the Moroccan Hasidic meetings nearby, I threw myself into it too. I became someone else, and I was fine with that. It was the first time I’d felt like my own person. That’s what I thought, at least. Today, all I see when I look back is Laura’s corpse. I can’t look myself in the mirror anymore.”

  Aïcha and Bintou are extremely shaken by the stories they’ve heard. Unable to say a single word, the light-eyed girl tears off a piece of napkin and notes down Rachel’s address. Before handing it to Ruben, she writes in the bottom-right corner:

  3:30 a.m. All three of you.

  39

  The cleanup—the worst part. Or the best. Benamer usually likes it. But generally he is not recovering from being knocked out by the very person he was supposed to kill. He hadn’t been at all wary of Raymond Meyer. He messed up. He did bad. So many negative thoughts pile up that he forgets the task at hand. Enkell watches him as he continues to sponge down possible traces of the once large splotch of blood on the back window of the Scenic. He gives him a moment to get his act together.

  “Aïssa, are you coming? That window of yours is spic and span. We’ve got to finish off Le Gros’s body.”

  Aïssa Benamer shakes his head, stuffs the sponge into the Leader Price plastic bag along with the other things to dissolve, pulls out a folding hand truck from the trunk, extends it and wheels it the fifteen yards from the car to the corpse, the head of which is now encircled by a deep-red halo. Twelve minutes earlier, Raymond Meyer’s smile had barely disappeared when Frédéric Enkell fired a bullet into the back of Francis’s skull. Then he had woken Benamer with two resounding slaps, delegating to him the task of cleaning the blood-stained window. The two of them are now loading their overweight ex-colleague’s body onto the hand truck, before fastening it by the neck, chest, and waist, leaving the legs dangling. Nothing more awkward than shifting a corpse. That’s why, as a rule of thumb, they try to liquidate them as close as possible to their final destination. The biggest pain is lugging their wheeled cargo up the three outdoor steps. The door opens without any trouble onto a vast, bare room. In the middle, a large dark cylinder topped with a second smaller cylinder, like some sort of arty totem pole. The vat is two yards tall. Ladders run down either side. Between them is a bag from which Enkell pulls two neon-green protective overalls, while Benamer unties Francis Meyer’s body.

  DISSOLUTION

  Getting the body up to the top cylinder is not easy: each of them on one of the ladders, one holding the legs, the other the armpits. Fuck’s sake! Then they’ve got to balance the wobbling body on the rim, one of them holding it while the other hoists himself up to the highest part to unscrew the vat’s enormous lid. Ah, fucking overalls!

  WHAT THE FUCK AM I SUPPOSED TO DO

  NOW?

  The hole is too narrow to roll in the corpse in one go. Decision time: head first or feet first? The boss opts for the head, which naturally is the part he’s holding—he wants to watch. Then everything moves very quickly. Like when you’re diving. The vat is remarkably well designed: no splash at all. Almost could have managed it without these damn overalls, thinks the other man. Then there’s the sound. The sound that renders the situation extremely real. The sound of disappearance itself.

  FSSSHHHHHHHHH

  There we go—all done. But there’s plenty more work to be getting on with tonight.

  40

  2:30 a.m. at Rachel’s. Aïcha and Bintou are sitting patiently across the table from one another. Malongo coffee and Monoprix cookies at the ready. The laptop is on and they are logged in to Aïcha’s Skype account. Silence reigns, and it’s starting to get oppressive. Who’s going to get the ball rolling?

  “We’ve got something to tell you,” Bintou says.

  “Go on.”

  “Our brothers are coming around in a little bit after our chat with Rébecca. Ruben too.”

  Rachel waits for the follow-up. Bintou breaks off half a cookie and looks up at a colorful print depicting an Indian deity with two goddesses at his side. She takes it in for a moment—its serenity, its gentleness—before returning to the current situation, the horror. She takes a deep breath.

  “They didn’t do anything. And that will haunt them for the rest of their lives. That night, they saw the murderer. Sam was there with Moktar and another big, creepy guy. Moktar and the barber asked them to kidnap Laura, our brothers refused, then the creepy guy threatened them and they left . . . There you have it; that’s how it went. They left, and she was killed. My brother did nothing to prevent the murder. Nor did Aïcha’s, nor did Rébecca’s. They did nothing . . . Our brothers! . . . Our very own brothers . . .”

  Bintou starts sobbing and looks at Lieutenant Kupferstein, searching through her tears for the answer to the question she dares not ask. Rachel provides it with a resigned smile.

  “Three years: that’s what they’re looking at. Failure to report a suspected criminal offense. Three years and a forty-five-thousand dollar fine. Article 434-1 of the Code pénal. Of course, if they present themselves at the commissariat on their own accord, and if they help stop the killer, the judge will take that into consideration. I’m going to call Jean to make sure he’s there when they arrive. Later on we’ll all go to the Bunker together.”

  2:45 a.m. Just enough time to telephone her colleague before their Skype date with Rébecca. No answer. She doesn’t leave a message, hangs up, and calls back. He picks up on the third ring.

  “Uhhhhh.”

  “Jean. Can you be here in half an hour? It’s important.”

  She can hear him murmuring to someone.

  “Look, I’m sorry if this is a bad time, but I really need you now. Let’s just say things are accelerating. I’ll explain. Give my best to Léna.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  Aïcha stands up and comes around the table to hand Bintou a tissue and stroke her hair; her eyes work their way along the wall and settle on the brightly colored picture that had intrigued her friend a few minutes earlier. The polygamous Indian god. Rachel lets her soak up the image before deciphering it for her.

  “It’s Murugan, the brother of Ganesh. I bought it in a shop in La Chapelle run by a family from Kerala. I’ve always dreamed of going to Kerala. Maybe I’ll never go; maybe it’ll remain one of those unfulfilled desires that you accumulate through life, like when you keep loving a man who doesn’t have any idea and never will, but who you can keep, intact, in a sacred part of your heart. A man you can’t even imagine making love to. Anyway, for those fantasies you’ve always got the actors: Irrfan Khan, Tony Leung, Charles Berling . . .”

  “Or Javier Bardem . . .”

  The words slipped out of Bintou’s full lips with a very soft breath.

  “Or Javier Bardem, yes . . . Each to their own. They’re precious. But it’s different with gods or religious icons. In them, desire is abolished. In them, we find peace.”

  Bintou listens to her intently, and continues to do so despite Rachel’s silence. Where did it come from, this astonishing closeness forged with these girls she hadn’t even met the day before, and whose brothers have been implicated in this ghastly murder? Like with Ahmed: the trance, the miracle of the encounter. The miracle of this investigation. Beneath the timeless smile of Murugan, surrounded by his beautiful, eternally satisfied wives, radiating a sense of fulfillment that is at once carnal and not carnal, a moment of magical harmony unfolds. Divine fulfillment, thinks Rachel. So simple, so clear that humankind strives not to attain it.

  About twelve minutes to go until the call to Rébecca. Something in the air demands that a true word be said. And it springs delicately from Bintou’s lips.

  Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,

  I
will fear no evil,

  for you are with me;

  your rod and your staff,

  they comfort me. You prepare a table before me

  in the presence of my enemies;

  you anoint my head with oil;

  my cup overflows. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me

  all the days of my life,

  and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

  She stops, closes her eyes for a second.

  “When Rébecca started dressing up like an Orthodox Jew, it was to keep her mother and brother happy, but it was also to see what it was all about. She read the Bible. I was curious, so I learned a few passages with her. That psalm moved us. It’s sad and beautiful. Unsettling, but at the same time reassuring. What’s even stranger is that I’ve never read the Koran. I think it’s a menacing, dangerous book, while the Bible has never scared me. It wasn’t the book of my religion, so I didn’t risk anything by reading it.”

  Rachel interrupts, surprised.

  “Menacing? Why?”

  “I’m going to tell you a secret; something that happened back when I was eight. We were in the suburbs of Paris at my cousin’s house, Fanta, who was nine at the time. At one point we locked ourselves in the bathroom. I can’t remember how or why, but suddenly she asked me if I’d been cut. I had no idea what she was talking about, so she showed me. And I saw what she was missing; what I still had. I started crying. I’m not sure if I was sad for her or for me, but I wasn’t able to stop. It wasn’t until we got home that I ended up telling my mother what had happened in the bathroom. Mom consoled me, reassuring me by saying that no one would ever do something like that to me, even though she had herself suffered the same fate, back in the village, when she was a child. Shaking her head sadly, she kept repeating: “We’re not in Mauritania now, but still, poor Fanta . . .” When I was older, she told me how the village imam back in Sélibaby, on the north bank of the river, had publicly declared that girls had to remain pure, even in the land of the infidel—especially in the land of the infidel. He was an old, toothless imam with a face harder than a zebu’s skull. Unfortunately for Fanta, her mother had obeyed the man of God. I think that all I am comes from that bit of luck—from not being my aunt’s daughter. From preserving my body intact. I don’t feel superior to Fanta, nor to any girl who’s been cut. That’s not at all what I mean. I just think that the most profound part of my identity is rooted in the fact that I wasn’t. It comes from my mother’s desire for me to be different from her. It’s strange—this is the first time I’ve told this to anyone other than Rébecca or Aïcha. The first time I have truly understood how much it has made me who I am.”