by Michel Bussi
ALSO BY
MICHEL BUSSI
After the Crash
Black Water Lilies
Time Is a Killer
Don’t Let Go
Europa Editions
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New York NY 10001
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously.
First published in French as N’oublier jamais by Presses de la Cité,
a department of Place des Editeurs, Paris 2014
First published in English in 2020 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London
Copyright: Presses de la Cité, a department of Place des éditeurs 2020
First Publication 2020 by Europa Editions
Translation by Shaun Whiteside
Original Title: N’oublier jamais
Translation copyright © 2020 by Shaun Whiteside
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
Cover Art by Emanuele Ragnisco
www.mekkanografici.com
Cover illustration by Mariachiara Di Giorgio
ISBN 9781609456375
Michel Bussi
NEVER FORGET
Translated from the French
by Shaun Whiteside
To Arthur . . . 18 tomorrow!
You come across a pretty girl on a cliff edge,
don’t reach out to her!
People might think you’ve pushed her.
NEVER FORGET
Fécamp, July 13th, 2014
From: Lieutenant Bertrand Donnadieu, National gendarmerie, Territorial Brigade of the District of Étretat, Seine-Maritime
To: M. Gérard Calmette, Director of the Disaster Victim Identification Unit (DVIU), Criminal Research Institute of the National Gendarmerie, Rosny-sous-Bois
Dear Monsieur Calmette,
At 2:45 A.M. on July 12th, 2014, a section of cliff of about 45,000 cubic metres collapsed above Valleuse d’Etigues, 3 km west of Yport. Rockfalls of this type are not uncommon on our coast. The emergency services arrived on the scene an hour later and established beyond a doubt that there are no casualties resulting from this incident.
However, and this is the reason for this letter, while no walkers were caught in the landslide, the first responders made a strange discovery. Lying among the debris scattered over the beach were three human skeletons.
Police officers dispatched to the site found no personal effects or items of clothing in the vicinity that would enable them to identify the victims. It’s possible that they might have been cavers who became trapped; the network of karst caves beneath the famous white cliffs are a popular attraction. However no cavers have been reported missing in recent months or indeed years. We have analysed the bones with the limited equipment at our disposal and they do not appear to be very old.
I should add that the bones were scattered over forty metres of beach as a result of the landslide. The Departmental Brigade of Forensic Investigation, under the auspices of Colonel Bredin, pieced together the skeletons. Their initial analysis confirms our own: not all of the bones seem to have reached the same level of decomposition. Bizarre as it may seem, this suggests the three individuals had died in that cavity in the cliff at different times, probably several years apart. The cause of their death remains unknown: during our examination of the remains we found no trauma that would have proved fatal.
With no evidence to go on, ante or post mortem, we are unable to pursue the usual lines of inquiry that would allow us to determine who these three individuals were. When they died. What killed them.
The local community, recently unnerved by a macabre event that has no apparent connection to the discovery of these three unidentified corpses, is understandably rife with speculation.
Which is why, Director, while I am aware of the number of urgent matters requiring your attention, and the suffering of those awaiting formal identification of deceased relatives, I would ask you to make this case a priority so that we may proceed with our investigation.
Yours sincerely,
Lieutenant Bertrand Donnadieu,
Territorial Brigade of the District of Étretat
FIVE MONTHS EARLIER, FEBRUARY 19TH, 2014
Watch out, Jamal, the grass will be slippery on the cliff.”
André Jozwiak, landlord of the Hotel-Restaurant Sirène, issued the caution before he could stop himself. He’d put on a raincoat and was standing outside his front door. The mercury in the thermometer that hung above the menu was struggling to rise above the blue line indicating zero. There was hardly any wind, and the weathervane—a cast-iron sailing ship fixed to one of the beams on the façade—seemed to have frozen during the night.
The drowsy sun dragged itself wearily above the sea, illuminating a light coating of frost on the cars parked outside the casino. On the beach in front of the hotel the pebbles huddled together like shivering eggs abandoned by a bird of prey. Beyond the final towering sea stack lay the coast of Picardy, a hundred kilometres due east.
Jamal passed the front of the casino and, taking brisk, short strides, set off up Rue Jean-Hélie. André watched him go, blowing on his hands to warm them up. It was almost time to serve breakfast to the few customers who spent their winter holidays overlooking the Channel. At first the landlord had thought the young disabled Arab was odd, running along the footpath every morning, with one muscular leg and one that ended in a carbon foot wedged into a trainer. Now, he felt genuine affection for the boy. When he was still in his twenties, Jamal’s age, André used to cycle over a hundred kilometres every Sunday morning, Yport–Yvetot–Yport, three hours with no one pestering him. If this kid from Paris with his weird foot wanted to work up a sweat at first light . . . well, he understood.
Jamal’s shadow reappeared briefly at the corner of the steps that rose towards the cliffs, before disappearing behind the casino wheelie bins. The landlord took a step forward and lit a Winston. He wasn’t the only one braving the cold: in the distance, two silhouettes stood out against the wet sand. An old lady holding an extending lead with a ridiculous little dog—the kind that looks as if it runs on batteries, operated by remote control, and so conceited that it goaded the seagulls with hysterical yaps. Two hundred metres further on, a tall man, hands in the pockets of a worn brown leather jacket, stood by the sea, glowering at the waves as if he wanted to take revenge on the horizon.
André spat out the butt of his cigarette and went back into the hotel. He didn’t like to be seen unshaven, badly dressed, his hair a mess, looking like the sort of caveman Mrs. Cro-Magnon would have walked out on many moons ago.
His steps keeping to a metronomic rhythm, Jamal Salaoui was climbing the highest cliff in Europe. One hundred and twenty metres. Once he’d left the last the last of the houses behind, the road dwindled to a footpath. The panorama opened up to Étretat, ten kilometres away. Jamal saw the two silhouettes at the end of the beach, the old woman with the little dog and the man staring out to sea. Three gulls, perhaps frightened by the dog’s piercing cries, rose from the cliff and blocked his path before soaring ten metres above him.
The first thing Jamal saw, just past the sign pointing to the Rivage campsite, was the red scarf. It was fixed to the fence like a danger sign. That was Jamal’s first thought:
Danger.
A warning of a rockfall, a flood, a dead animal.
The idea passed as swiftly as it had come. It was just a scarf caught on barbed wire, lost by a walker and carried away by the wind coming off the sea.
Reluctant to break the rhythm of his run, to p
ause for a closer look at the dangling fabric, he almost carried straight on. Everything would have turned out quite differently if he had.
But Jamal slowed his pace, then stopped.
The scarf looked new. It gleamed bright red. Jamal touched it, studied the label.
Cashmere. Burberry . . . This scrap of fabric was worth a small fortune! Jamal delicately detached the scarf from the fence and decided that he would take it back to the Sirène with him. André Jozwiak knew everyone in Yport, he would know if someone had lost it. And if it wasn’t claimed, Jamal would keep it. He stroked the fabric as he continued his run. Once he was back home in La Courneuve, he doubted he would risk wearing it over his tracksuit. In his neighbourhood, someone would rip your head off for a € 500 cashmere scarf! But he would no doubt find a pretty girl who’d be happy to wear it.
As he drew near the blockhouse, to his right a small flock of sheep turned their heads in his direction. They were waiting for the grass to thaw with a lobotomised look which reminded him of the idiots at he worked with, standing by the microwave at lunchtime.
Just past the blockhouse, Jamal saw the girl.
He immediately gauged the distance between her and the edge of the cliff. Less than a metre! She was standing on the precipice, looking down at a sheer drop of over a hundred metres. His brain reeled, calculating the risks: the incline to the void, the frost on the grass. The girl was more at risk here than she would have been standing on the ledge of the highest window of a thirty-storey building.
“Miss, are you all right?”
Jamal’s words were snatched away by the wind. No response.
He was still a hundred and fifty metres from the girl.
Despite the intense cold, she was wearing only a loose red dress torn into two strips, one floating over her navel and then to her thighs, the other yawning from the top of her neck to the base of her chest, revealing the fuchsia cup of a bra.
She was shivering.
Beautiful. Yet for Jamal there was nothing erotic about this image. Surprising, moving, unsettling, but nothing sexual. When he thought about it later, trying to fathom it out, the nearest equivalent that came to mind was a vandalised work of art. A sacrilege, an inexcusable contempt for beauty.
“Are you all right, miss?” he said again.
She turned towards him. He stepped forward.
The grass came halfway up his legs, and it occurred to him that the girl mightn’t have noticed the prosthesis fixed to his left leg. He was now facing her. Ten metres between them. The girl had moved closer to the precipice, standing with her back to the drop.
He could see that she’d been crying; her mascara had run, then dried. Jamal struggled to marshal his thoughts.
Danger.
Emergency.
Above all emotion. He felt overwhelmed by emotion. He had never seen such a beautiful woman. Her features would be imprinted on his memory for ever: the perfect oval of her face, framed by twin cascades of jet-black hair, her coal-black eyes and snow-white skin, her eyebrows and mouth forming thin, sharp lines, as if traced by a finger dipped in blood and soot. He wondered whether he was in shock, whether this was impacting his assessment of the situation, the distress of this stranger, the need to grab her hand without waiting for an answer.
“Miss . . .”
He held out his hand.
“Don’t come any closer,” the girl said.
It was more a plea than an order. The embers in her coal-black irises seemed to have been extinguished.
“O.K.,” Jamal stammered. “O.K. Stay right where you are, let’s take this nice and slow.”
Jamal’s eye slipped over her skimpy dress. She must have come out of the casino a hundred metres below. Of an evening, the hall of the Sea View turned into a discotheque.
A night’s clubbing that had gone wrong? Tall, slim, and sexy, she would have drawn plenty of admirers. Clubs were full of creeps who came to check out the babes.
Jamal spoke as calmly as he could:
“I’m going to step forward slowly, I want you to take my hand.”
The young woman lowered her gaze for the first time and paused at the sight of the carbon prosthesis. This drew an involuntary look of surprise, but she regained control almost immediately.
“If you take so much as a step, I’ll jump.”
“O.K., O.K., I won’t move . . .”
Jamal froze, not even daring to breathe. Only his eyes moved, from the girl who had emerged from nowhere, to the orange dawn on the edge of the horizon.
A bunch of drunks following her every move on the dance floor, Jamal thought. And among them, at least one sick bastard, maybe several, perverted enough to follow the girl when she left. Hunt her down. Rape her.
“Has . . . has someone hurt you?”
She burst into tears.
“You could never understand. Keep running. Go! Get out of here, now!”
An idea . . .
Jamal put his hands around his neck. Slowly. But not slowly enough. The girl recoiled, took a step backwards, closer to the drop.
Jamal froze. He wanted to catch her in his hand as if she were a frightened sparrow that had fallen from the nest, unable to fly.
“I’m not going to move. I’m just going to throw you my scarf. I’ll hold one end. You grab the other, simple as that. It’s up to you whether to let go or not.”
The girl hesitated, surprised once again. Jamal took the opportunity to throw one end of the red cashmere scarf. Two metres separated him from the suicidal young woman.
The fabric fell at her feet.
She leaned forward delicately and, with absurd modesty pulled at the remains of her dress to cover her bare breast, then stood, clutching the end of Jamal’s scarf.
“Easy does it,” Jamal said. “I’m going to pull on the scarf, wrap it around my hands. Let yourself be dragged towards me, two metres, just two metres further from the edge.”
The girl gripped the fabric more tightly.
Jamal knew then that he had won, that he had done the right thing, throwing this scarf the way a sailor throws a lifebelt to someone who’s drowning, drawing them gently to the surface, centimetre by centimetre, taking infinite care not to break the thread.
“Easy does it,” he said again. “Come towards me.”
For a brief moment he realised that he had just met the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. And that he had saved her life.
That was enough to make him lose concentration for one tiny second.
Suddenly the girl pulled on the scarf. It was the last thing Jamal had expected. One sharp, swift movement.
The scarf slid from his hands.
What followed took less than a second.
The girl’s gaze fixed on him, indelibly, as if she were looking at him from the window of a passing train. There was a finality to that gaze.
“Noooo!” Jamal shouted.
The last thing he saw was the red cashmere scarf floating between the girl’s fingers. A moment later she toppled into the void.
So did Jamal’s life, but he didn’t know it yet.
I
INSTRUCTION
1
JAMAL SALAOUI’S DIARY
For a long time, I was unlucky.
Fortune never favoured me. I came to imagine life as a huge conspiracy, with the whole world against me. And at the heart of this conspiracy was a god who behaved like a sadistic teacher, preying on the weakest kid in the class. Meanwhile the rest of the class, only too happy not to be on the receiving end, joined in. From a distance, to avoid getting caught in the crossfire. As if bad luck was contagious.
Then, over the years, I came to understand.
It’s an illusion.
In life, the most vicious god you’re likely to meet is a teacher who treats you as a scapegoat.
Gods, like
teachers, don’t give a damn about you. You don’t exist for them.
You’re on your own.
If you want things to go your way, you have to keep playing the game. You have to pick yourself up and start over, again and again.
Keep trying.
It’s the law of probability. And perhaps, at the end of the day, of luck.
My name is Jamal.
Jamal Salaoui.
Not the kind of name that brings good luck, apparently.
Although . . .
My first name, you may have noticed, is the same as that of Jamal Malik, the boy in Slumdog Millionaire. And that’s not the only thing we have in common. We are both Muslims in a country that is not, and we don’t give a toss. He grew up in Dharavi, a Bombay slum, and I grew up in the Barre Balzac—the “Cité des 4000”—in La Courneuve. I don’t know if you can really compare the two of us. Even physically. He isn’t very handsome, with his sticky-out ears and his scared-sparrow expression. Neither am I. Worse, I’ve only got one leg, or rather one and a half; the second ends at the knee with a flesh-coloured plastic-and-carbon prosthesis. I’ll tell you about it one day.
It was one of those times when luck wasn’t on my side.
But the main point we have in common is standing right in front of me. Jamal Malik’s greatest prize isn’t the millions of rupees, it’s Latika, his sweetheart, pretty as a picture, particularly at the end, with her yellow veil, when he finds her again at Bombay station. She’s his jackpot.
I’m the same.
The incredibly desirable girl sitting across from me has just put on a blue tulip dress. Her breasts dance under the silk of a low-cut neckline that I’m allowed to plunge my eyes into for as long as I like. How can I put it so you’ll understand? She’s my feminine ideal. It’s as if she had been flirting with me in my dreams night after night before appearing in front of me one fine morning.