‘Nothing, I was just thinking it’s a nice day, and … Never mind, forget it.’
‘Seriously, everyone’s being all weird today. I don’t know what’s going on.’
‘No, no,’ Fat Momo reassured him, ‘go and just take care, eh.’
Krim could tell something was weighing on his friend, but he didn’t have the strength to make him spit it out.
As was often the case, Fat Momo told him anyway. ‘That other psycho. Benbaraka.’
‘Ah, well, I don’t give a shit about him,’ Krim grumbled.
‘Yeah but what are you going to do this evening? He’s what, the great-uncle of the girl Slim’s marrying? He has to be there, wallah, he has to.’
‘Well, he wasn’t at the town hall. See you later.’
He walked back up the road he’d just come down. His fist was trembling and he felt vaguely like throwing up. Passing a window daubed with grey paint, he noticed a whole section had been replaced with semi-reflective glass. He used it to assess the damage. Minimal, fortunately: a green smear on his thigh and some pine needles in the back.
His telephone buzzed: he had five missed calls from his mother. He texted her to say he was coming and stopped for a minute to compose himself in front of the Saint-Ennemond church. It was framed by two streets: the one on the right went up to the library opposite where Granny lived, and the one on the left led to the car park. He took the one on the left and went around the library to be sure no one could see him from the balcony. The wind had picked up and the beautiful clouds of the early afternoon had been stolen by a thick veil of pearl-grey fumes. Something was burning. On the other side of the railway, a man in shorts was torching rubbish in a copper drum. Behind him a cloud of shanties stretched out at the foot of what, in the family, were known as ‘the two mountains by Granny’s’. These mountains were slag heaps from the mine at Clapier. There was nothing less natural than these piles of coal waste, and yet trees had already thickened on their slopes; only the summits remained bald to betray their status.
Krim remembered seeing them in a different light on the day of his father’s funeral. From the cemetery perched high on Côte-chaude, the two innocuous mountains by Granny’s had appeared to him then as the outposts of hell. The pitheads that once swallowed lifts down into the mine lost their harmless postcard stupidity that afternoon. It was no longer the neighbourhood’s fake little Eiffel Tower, but the demonic metal structure it had been at the time when its winding-wheel still sent men into the depths of the earth.
Desperate to escape the chill brought on by this tragic landscape, Krim hiked back up to the library through the small park behind it. He couldn’t resist stretching out on a shiny little hill that could have been straight out of Teletubbies.
His phone vibrated again: another text – from his mother, of course – but it wasn’t addressed to him. Krim read it three times to be sure he wasn’t dreaming:
Received: Today at 6.13 p.m.
From: Mum
I feel like I’ve always known you even though we’ve never met, it’s so bizarre! I can’t wait to meet you this evening!!! I also had a silly question: how will I recognize you!? Hugs and kisses, Rabinuche.
Krim jumped up and took his head in his hands, looking for something around him to destroy, but the bench was obviously unmovable and the first dustbin was at the park exit. The thirty seconds it took for him to reach it had already lessened his fury, so he just stared, in a daze, at the contents of its green transparent plastic bag flanked by a notice some advertiser had not only dreamed up but even convinced an entire galaxy of civil servants to publish. No doubt it was the slogan of his career: YES WE GARBAGE CAN.
Saint-Priest-en-Jarez, 6.15 p.m.
Of the myriad instructions that Farid and Fares hadn’t followed, the one that struck Fares as most significant concerned the beige jacket he was now using to prevent Zoran from seeing where they were taking him. But did twins who wore the same jacket not attract twice as much attention as twins with different outfits? It took Fares a good twenty minutes to ask this question, between the intuition of the problem (hampered by his surveillance mission), the mental formulation (always delicate with him), and the pronunciation (which was all the more stilted, thanks to his cold). Their white Kangoo, emblazoned with a logo made up of two S’s in the shape of snakes fighting each other, was already entering the residential suburb that housed the headquarters of the security agency that had hired them. All that effort, this whole adventure, just to get the reply:
‘Shut up, can’t you see we’re just about there?’
Farid drove with his nose against the windshield so as not to miss the right street – a regular enough occurrence that usually meant turning back at the roundabout a kilometre further on.
The neighbourhood looked spectacularly uniform: estate houses all made of the same pale concrete, with the same line of pine trees at every crossroads to shield the grounds from curious onlookers.
‘We should maybe ask for a GPS, no?’
Fares noticed that whenever Farid said nothing, his eyelid rose in the rear-view mirror. He leaned down a little to see his brother’s face but the car braked abruptly.
Farid deliberately skidded onto the kerb and ordered Fares to get out immediately.
‘But … and …’
‘I told you to get out.’
Farid put his hands behind his head and stretched. At his feet the Furan River shimmered, emitting a smell of sewage and wet wood. The endless twittering of the birds somehow amplified its murmur. He leaned over to study its depths. He was less brawny than Fares but more menacing. Pumping iron had made Fares more of a spectacle, but Farid took pride in not having lifted so much as a gram to achieve his more than honourable musculature.
Fares, too, began to contemplate the little river but Farid swung around so quickly that he thought his brother was going to tweak his ear. He had certainly done it before – a few years earlier and again just last week, during what Farid claimed was a sleepwalking episode.
‘I’m going to ask you a question and you’re going to answer yes or no, okay?’
‘Uh … okay.’ Fares hadn’t caught on yet.
‘Do you think what we’re doing is normal? Just answer me, don’t think. Yes or no?’
Fares felt this was a trap and half-closed his mouth so as not to come straight out with something stupid. He began to bring his index finger up to his lips when Farid hit him really hard on the neck.
Unlike him, Farid had his father’s big eyes, those of an irascible and problematic man – someone around whom everyone, sooner or later, ended up feeling like a problem.
‘What is it you think we’re doing here? You realize this is no joke, that we could go to prison? Do you realize?’
The silence was intensified by the purr of the river.
‘You listening to me, you moron?’
‘Yes, yes, calm down. So then why—’
‘What? What are you going to say?’
‘Why … no, no … nothing.’
Farid’s phone vibrated in his right hand.
‘It’s him? What’s he doing?’
‘You can see, he’s phoning me! Get in the car, I’m going to ask him when he’s meeting us.’
Fares returned to the back seat, where their prisoner began to speak in a mixture of Romanian and French – words that must have been addressed to him. Zoran had an unpleasant voice, a plaintive, whining guttural that sullied the ear, like a small bell that stops you from thinking, a small bell that might somehow also be sweaty and greasy, but here it was as if that little bell was a clot of slime. In the weight room there was a women’s bodybuilding champion who had a similar mix of male and female registers: girly intonations and words that came out of a thorax so developed it must have modified the thickness of the vocal cords.
‘Shut it!’ screamed Fares, slapping the prisoner’s head, which jutted out from beneath his jacket.
When Farid got back behind the wheel, he looked preoccu
pied. He accelerated and took the first street that climbed the hill. They were no longer in Saint-Etienne, but in the Saint-Priest-en-Jarez municipality. At the end of another dreary subdivision was a half-buried house with a three-car garage, where a pick-up truck and another Kangoo were sleeping. You had to look at the rectangle on the intercom to read the agency’s name: SECURITATIS. The double S logo was nowhere to be seen, which meant that apart from the few company cars that hadn’t left the car park since the agency had gone bankrupt, nothing indicated that it was a business headquarters rather than the home of a reclusive pensioner who wasn’t very fond of gardening.
Farid backed the car in so he could leave easily. He turned to Zoran. ‘Listen, if you say anything without me asking, I’ll smash your face. You get it? You’ve the dirty mouth of a gypsy faggot, get it?’
Zoran was trembling too much to speak. He gingerly moved his head up and down and let himself be taken out of the car.
‘I’ll smash your face, wallah, I’ll smash your face,’ Farid repeated, more for himself than for the prisoner.
Fares didn’t look happy about the turn of events.
Farid threw the keys on the bar separating the American kitchen from the open-plan living room and barked at his twin brother: ‘Find the key to the shed. I think it’s the red one.’
Fares pushed Zoran into the centre of the kitchen and looked for the red key. On paper, picking a red key out of a dozen was a mission for an eight year old, but, as usual, when it was his turn to carry it out, there simply wasn’t one. Feverishly, Fares went through the keys ten times. The closest he could find was circled in orange. When Farid came out of the bathroom, Fares handed it to him.
‘I said the red one, idiot.’
Farid had to admit after a few seconds that there wasn’t a red key in the bunch he’d given his brother. Perplexed, he went down the stairs, encouraging Fares and Zoran to follow him. An economy bulb cast a lugubrious blue light over the basement. Zoran stumbled and was held back in extremis by Fares. Farid opened door after door of rooms filled with boxes and files, looking for the one that was locked from the outside. But he must have imagined it, for none of the doors he tried had locks. He turned to Fares and pointed to the door with closed shutters looking out onto the garden. This one was completely sealed off, so it seemed obvious to him there was no risk in leaving Zoran in the basement, locked doors or no.
But Fares was obsessing over the room to the left, which also opened out onto the garden and contained weapons, walkie-talkies and the safe. He leaned down to look under the doormat; his white underpants followed suit and revealed the crack of his backside, beaded with two monstrously symmetrical moles.
He was snivelling like a pig when he stood back up empty-handed. When Farid nodded his head in the direction of the cupboard beneath the stairs, Fares shoved their prisoner inside.
Farid got up close to Zoran’s face, which was smeared with dried tears mixed with snot. ‘You move and I’ll break you in two, you dirty fucking tranny.’
Zoran nodded frantically, not daring to look into his torturer’s eyes.
Fares went back up with his brother and sat down in the kitchen, sighing as if he’d just returned from a long and satisfying day’s work. His mobile began to ring with the chorus of: Born in the USA.
‘Who’s been phoning you since this morning?’ Farid shouted as he rummaged through the cupboards for some booze. ‘And I told you to put your mobile on vibrate!’
Fares apologized profusely and switched off his phone. He spotted a drawer that his brother hadn’t yet searched. Farid got there before him anyway and in it discovered a box of coffee filters and a grinder. So Fares went and sat down on one of the desks in the living room and played around with the telephone.
There was nothing to do in this godforsaken house. He couldn’t watch television; he couldn’t go on a PlayStation. The company laptops were in the shed, so he couldn’t even get onto Facebook, where for three months now he’d been chatting up a jujitsu instructor living in the Haute-Loire.
The coffee was rising in fits and starts. Fares thought of the four women he’d known in his life: a waitress who was older than him and enjoyed his candour; a depressed widow who found a way to manipulate him; a sex bomb in the weight room who ended up confessing she wanted to sleep with him and Farid at the same time; and finally the predictable Algerian girl with emerald reptilian eyes, a Machiavellian creature who wanted to marry him for the papers and might have succeeded, making his life impossible with a thousand little schemes, if his brother had not been there to open his eyes.
Downstairs Zoran began to moan. Fares moved to the middle of the room and did a few push-ups. But Zoran’s groaning grew increasingly annoying, so he returned to the open space instead, where he waited for Farid to order him to go and see what their prisoner wanted.
But Farid was watching the coffee and typing a text, looking like he didn’t want to be disturbed. This, Fares felt, gave him the right to switch his own mobile back on. He briefly looked at the messages he’d received over the last few days.
The one sent by his great-nephew Jibril broke his heart every time he read it: ‘Thanks all de seme, uncle.’ In a fit of generosity, Fares had offered to take Jibril to watch a Saint-Etienne football match, but he hadn’t thought of booking seats and they’d ended up begging for tickets outside.
Two weeks later, the memory of that futile evening still burned his stomach: the stadium crowded with people and none of them there to help them, the aloof arrogance of those in a hurry, the hypocritical concern of those who pretended to be sorry they didn’t have tickets to spare. It wasn’t his stomach, in fact; it was higher up, at the bottom of the throat, the taste of shame, of waste and insufficiency, the relentless malaise, as if thoughts and seconds alike were burdened with impregnable lead.
Ultimately, the prospect of refreshment had restored some dignity to the evening – even Jibril had a fine time of it, nibbling on merguez frites in front of the big screen at Café des Sports. Now, that was a change of pace from doing your homework and watching Survivor – not to mention the fact that, as the kid himself had observed with one of those sage expressions that occasionally visit the face of an excited child, a zero–zero draw wasn’t that bad a result given their thirteenth league position at the end of the season.
Slightly intoxicated by his improved mood, Fares went to the bathroom to refresh his face. When he came out, Farid was standing ramrod straight.
‘Okay, we’d better get ready, he’ll be here in ten or fifteen minutes.’
‘And what do we do?’
‘Um, I don’t know, how should I know?’
‘What’s this poor bugger actually done? Why was he kidnapped when he wasn’t even up to anything?’
When Farid didn’t reply, Fares went over to the window anddelicately pulled open the curtain. The street was quiet but the road shone like a mirror: had it begun to rain? He couldn’t hear a thing. The bowl-shaped streetlights gradually lit up. Fares listened closely in hope of detecting that sound of fluttering wings he sometimes heard coming out of them on summer evenings.
A plane suddenly broke the sound barrier. Zoran chose that exact moment to scream. Farid rolled up his sleeves and slowly went down the stairs, staring at his half-wit brother standing in front of the window, as if to teach him a lesson, to make him understand that they weren’t there for fun.
The infamous Mouloud Benbaraka stopped his car on the road, in front of the white door of the garage where the vehicles of his bankrupt company were parked. He looked at the back seat where he’d put the cage. While his BMW’s alarm clamoured because of the open door, Benbaraka stared at the double S logo his associate had designed himself.
‘Moron,’ he said, spitting on one of the Kangoo’s tyres.
Fares was drumming his hands on his knees when Benbaraka came in. Farid ordered him to stop and stood up to salute the boss. Fares felt that it was the right moment to say something, but Farid silenced him, so he l
ooked at the floor instead and ostentatiously kept his peace, as if for prayer.
Benbaraka presented the cage to the twins and placed it at the foot of the table. An enormous brown beast was moving in there dolefully.
Farid commenced his report and rubbed his neck while making his thick left bicep bulge in time. ‘You see, like, we haven’t bashed him around that much yet. But honestly, I’m not sure he really wants to talk.’
‘That’s what we’re going to find out,’ declared Benbaraka, storming down the stairs.
Farid passed the cage to Fares and dragged Zoran out from the cupboard. He slapped him across the cheeks a few times. Zoran was already winded, and soon began to lose consciousness.
A smile split Benbaraka’s cruel face in two, his eyes half-closed. He stopped Farid and took Zoran by the shoulders. ‘What’s with the bad manners? Have a little respect for our guest. Come on, come into the other room. We’ll have more space to talk.’
He was referring to the room with no window. It was furnished with a velvet sofa, a fold-up bed, a desk topped with candle holders, and a dust-covered floor lamp. Farid took the boxes off the bed where Benbaraka’s associate sometimes slept when passing through Saint-Etienne. Without ceasing to smile and rub his hands, Benbaraka dropped onto the orangey red sofa while Zoran was forcibly seated on the bed. Fares remained in the doorway, ill at ease.
‘Okay,’ the boss began, ‘we’re not going to spend hours on this. You’re going to tell me what you were doing at the town hall just now, okay?’
Zoran snorted to transfer a lump of snot from the back of his nose to the edge of his throat. He swallowed it noiselessly while Farid shook his head, waiting for the order to smash his face in.
‘My two associates here have been following you for a few days, and it’s very simple: we just want to know what you were doing hanging around my niece and her husband. You tell us this and we’ll let you off the hook and I can go quietly to the wedding reception.’
Mouloud Benbaraka got up and opened the desk. He turned round and cracked his knuckles, his back and his neck. He looked like a snake onto which a spine, extremities, a whole human bone structure had been grafted – a new embodiment that he enjoyed exploring as a child would a new toy.
Savages- The Wedding Page 7