The morning mist on the farmland made Krim feel like smoking a cigarette. He went to the toilets between the two carriages and took the opportunity to count the banknotes left over from Nazir’s last envelope. He had enough to eat on the train if he wanted to, but he wasn’t hungry. The stress of the last few hours had ruined his appetite, and as always when he wasn’t hungry, he desperately wanted to smoke.
He put his cigarette between his teeth, the way his father used to do to amuse him. He was about to text Nazir to recount the last developments when it suddenly seemed more urgent, more necessary, more crucial for him to write to Aurélie.
Hi Aurélie, it’s Krim. I’m in Paris this weekend. Can I come and see you?
Krim dropped the cigarette and jumped up and down. He went to the buffet bar and bought an ice tea. While he wracked his brains to figure out if his message was suitable, too much so or not enough, the TGV crossed the first suburbs of the south of Paris – red-brick buildings, narrow and dirty apartment blocks, rectangular factories placed like so many bits of Lego on a long, inhospitable wasteland that the sun was gently waking.
He returned to his seat and listened to Kanye West’s ‘Family Business’, one of his favourites, which he’d introduced Aurélie to that previous summer. He knew the melody by heart without actually understanding the words. Each note seemed to contain Aurélie’s beauty. Each note was an extra freckle on her sun-kissed breasts.
He pressed Send.
The Frenchman in front of him had fallen asleep. His arms were crossed and he snored softly. Krim noticed the silver watch he’d taken off and left on the seat beside him. When the train exited a short tunnel, it began to gleam provocatively; Krim grabbed it and changed carriages. He was very pleased with himself for not attracting attention by lighting his cigarette earlier in the toilets. Taking refuge in the second-class carriage the furthest from his own, he heard the announcement that they were arriving at Gare de Lyon and texted Aurélie that he was now in Paris. He was the first to step out onto the platform, where he sprinted off to the square dominated by the Clock Tower.
An unusual number of soldiers were patrolling in the stations, machine guns slung over their shoulders. Krim stubbed out the cigarette he didn’t want to finish and suddenly thought of Fouad, at Granny’s, who’d thrown away the Camel he’d offered him after drawing three pathetic puffs, as if he was bored with him and in a hurry to speak to more interesting people.
He checked his mobile: fifty-five missed calls and twenty unread messages, the most recent of which was from Nazir:
Received: Today at 9.29 a.m.
From: N
Train on time? Meet you know where, hurry.
Nazir had insisted he wear a watch on arrival in Paris. Krim had found an old Swatch in his sister’s chest of drawers, but, as he replaced it with the Frenchman’s from the train, he thought he remembered winning the trinket with his father at a fair and decided he didn’t want to get rid of it. So he put the other one on his right wrist and took his first steps into the capital, wearing two watches that, miraculously – as he discovered while a beggar woman threatened him with her miserable gibberish – were only seven seconds apart.
Paris, 10 a.m.
He followed the directions and after five minutes found the metro entrance to Line 14. Nazir had insisted he not travel without a ticket, but he hadn’t gone as far as putting any in the envelope. Krim bought a ticket and sat down at the back of the driverless train. The infernal corridors snaked away from the back window as the long car swallowed them up.
Krim’s eyes lingered on a girl in a striped sailor’s t-shirt. She had sat down in front of him and was tapping frenetically on her white BlackBerry. Krim was captivated by her beauty, of a kind he seemed to have encountered only with Aurélie. She had black hair, a long, fine nose, dark eyes and above all a porcelain complexion that seemed to be centuries old and that contrasted with the red of her faintly painted lips.
The most beautiful women in the world were all equally inaccessible.
On the second train that would take him to his destination, Krim found himself across from a large black woman who was busy knitting. An accordionist entered their car and began to play a very personal rendition of a Joe Dassin song. The black mamma came to life on recognizing the tune and began to sing at the top of her voice, seeking the enthusiastic approval of those sitting next to her.
‘Oh Lord in your heart my life is just dust! Oh Lord in your heart my life is just dust! Ah ah it’s incredible! Oh Lord …’
When he left the metro his head was swimming. In Paris the sky was bigger, the buildings richer, people’s gestures more lively, and their eyes incomparably harder. The air molecules also seemed larger, and Krim felt that he was not going to be able to hold out for long in this rarefied atmosphere where everyone looked at him with disdain. He didn’t recognize anything anywhere. The boulevards abounded with intimidating brasseries; the Haussmann-era buildings were adorned with gargoyles and moulded cornices.
Nazir sent him another message while he looked for the address on his Post-it:
Received: Today at 10.07 a.m.
From: N.
You’re 5 min late. What the hell did I tell you? You in the area? This is no time for fooling around Krim.
‘Relax, give me a minute,’ Krim muttered.
He stopped at the foot of a smart building and tapped in the security code. A staircase led to a second door protected by another code. Krim climbed it without hearing the sound of his feet, muffled by a red-brown carpet embroidered with pale gold bands. The lift that took him to the fifth floor began to rattle about. Krim thought the cables were going to give way.
Arriving on the fifth floor, he didn’t dare get out of the lift. Nazir’s voice came through one of the doors on the landing and frightened him. He was screaming, and Krim couldn’t understand what he was saying. He thought of Aurélie and had the strange premonition that he might not see her for a long time if he joined Nazir straight away.
He had only to switch his priorities around: Aurélie now, Nazir later. He couldn’t risk not seeing her. He needed time; all he had to do was take it. And Nazir would understand he was in love. The way he’d understood everything else. And if he didn’t understand, too bad.
He texted his mother to tell her that his mobile had almost run out of battery and that there was no point in calling him: he was in Paris as planned, earlier than planned, and he was going to sleep at Uncle Lounis’s place – there was a good chance she would not call Uncle Lounis to check on his story because of the terrifying likeness of his uncle’s voice to his own father’s.
Aurélie’s reply beeped in the F-sharp tone of Nazir’s loudest scream:
Received: Today at 10.13 a.m.
From: A.
Come to my place, I had a party yesterday, I’m a little out of it but it’s cool.
The message ended with her address. Krim pressed the ground-floor button in the lift and ignored Nazir’s enraged calls setting fire to his mobile, whose battery was comfortably showing three bars out of four.
The fifteen minutes that followed were spent suffering in his undersized trainers. Loosening his laces had no effect: he had to stop every twenty metres and began to consider walking around in socks for the rest of the day. But Nazir must already have been really angry with him to call fifteen times in a row; it would be an unconscionable slight if Krim not only turned up late, but infringed on what his cousin had often called the golden rule of that Sunday morning: do not get noticed.
He searched desperately for the entrance to the metro he’d come out of a moment ago. There had been a map there, where he could figure out the quickest way to get to the Buttes Chaumont stop, where Aurélie lived.
At the end of a side street, exhausted, he noticed a small building with no front window. Given the appearance of the men waiting at the entrance, he gathered it was a mosque. When the last worshipper had gone in, Krim saw that the door wasn’t closed. He left his observation pos
t and heard a voice chanting prayers behind the unguarded vestibule’s door. Among the dozens of pairs lined up on the cardboard shelves, Krim spotted some cream loafers, size 11: he replaced them with his own trainers and made his escape.
He walked for half an hour until he found the Seine, which he decided to follow while he worked out what to do. He soon made his way across the bridge leading to Gare de Lyon. The fresh and sunny air cleansed his brain. His head was full of trumpet calls and glorious thoughts. Halfway along the bridge he saw a metro train crossing the sky on the bridge opposite, at the foot of the high-rise buildings. His own passageway suddenly seemed to have been built just to allow him to walk on the Seine.
He decided to take the first taxi ride of his life.
Saint-Etienne, 11 a.m.
Fouad left the room where his aunt had been admitted a few hours earlier and called Jasmine back, who’d been trying to reach him for a little while now.
‘My God, Fouad, I’m so sorry! Is your uncle better?’
‘Yes, yes, don’t worry. He’s gone home, my cousins are looking after him. Everything’s going to be okay now.’
‘And your aunt … this is terrible, I’m so sorry, I so wish I were with you right now.’
‘Yes, yes, things are going to be sorted out, don’t worry. Where are you all?’
‘You all’ was the entourage that had constantly surrounded Jasmine since the start of the campaign, a campaign in which she had ferociously refused to participate and which had caught up with her only after the first round. She’d been seen for the first time at her father’s side the week before, in the front row of the audience at the debate.
The young woman gave a long sigh. ‘There have been some problems with polling stations in the Cantal – why in that area, I have no idea – where ballots with Dad’s name have disappeared. He’s talking to his lawyers, but people won’t be voting before this afternoon.’
‘I thought it was bad form not to vote in the morning?’
‘No, no,’ Jasmine replied distractedly. ‘I don’t know much about all that. I don’t even know who I’m going to vote for …’
She had a beautiful voice, which was mischievous, childlike and piping when she talked in conversation, so much so that it was hard to fathom the vocal power she managed to display on stage. She was part of the forthcoming production of Rameau’s Les Indes galantes, the most keenly awaited show at the Aix-en-Provence festival, though awaited for non-musical reasons, which exasperated her.
‘When can I meet your family, Fouad?’
‘Soon, soon. Although, I’m rather glad you didn’t come to Slim’s wedding. It was …’ He stopped because he couldn’t find a sufficiently strong adjective, but also because he had another call.
After hanging up with Jasmine, whose life he’d been sharing intimately for six months now, he called the number that had just left him a message.
‘Hello, did you just call me?’
‘Yes, is this Monsieur Nerrouche? This is Claude Michelet, Assistant District Prosecutor. I’ve just been informed of last night’s events, and I wish to tell you that this odious act will not go unpunished, on any account.’
It was the sentence he’d prepared. His flow of words slowed considerably when Fouad remained silent at the end of the line and he had to keep going.
‘So then, I’m going to be personally in charge of finding the culprits, and I will make sure that they are punished in an exemplary fashion. It is truly and absolutely intolerable to attack a man, a man of mature age, I mean old, in this … odious way. So, I hope you will send my words of support to your family. And believe me, we will find them.’
‘Thank you, thank you, sir.’
Fouad returned to Zoulikha’s room. All the sisters had taken turns at her bedside, even though the on-duty nurse continued to claim that it was just a minor heart attack.
Rabia drew down the blinds and switched on the TV. She changed channels to LCI, which showed images of Chaouch from the day before at the Socialist Party headquarters on rue de Solferino.
‘No, no, switch it off,’ Zoulikha suddenly said in Kabyle.
‘What?’
‘Switch it off! Raichek, switch it off!’
‘But why?’
The old lady moved her head frantically on the pillow. Her sisters looked at her in terror. She seemed possessed.
‘Switch it off, raichek, off!’
It was the first time since their teenage years that they had seen her hair dishevelled, and the first time they’d ever heard her raise her voice.
Fouad entered, smiled at his old aunt’s wild hair, and asked to speak to his mother in private. But then the doctor arrived and the whole family got up to greet him. He was a tall, narrow, unflappable man with little round spectacles and an immaculate white shirt. He looked like he hated nothing more than having his time wasted. Without once looking up at the family, he examined Aunt Zoulikha’s file and gave a few instructions to the nurse behind him.
‘Everything will be fine, Madame,’ he declared, making for the exit.
Rabia stopped him and wanted to know more. While the doctor explained that she’d had an angina pectoris that wasn’t very serious, Fouad watched his aunts humbly drinking up the medicine man’s words. The immense respect he inspired in them, that fear mixed with superstition, repulsed him so much that he had to leave the room before the end of the speech.
Dounia soon joined her son, who was stretched out against the wall.
He looked at his mother’s darkened eyes and lost his temper. ‘You should go and sleep a little, there’s no point in staying here, she’s fine now! You heard the doctor, there’s nothing to worry about.’
‘What?’ Dounia exclaimed. ‘You think she’s fine? Have you seen her?’
‘I mean she’s stable, nothing’s going to happen to her.’
Dounia shook her head.
‘Krim’s in Paris, by the way. At his uncle’s,’ she added. ‘Rabia’s going to kill him when he returns, I swear she’s going to kill him. This is the last straw.’
Fouad remained silent. He’d completely forgotten about Krim and was now very angry with him.
‘What did you want to tell me, my dear?’
Fouad hesitated and stared at the white window at the very end of the corridor. ‘What the hell’s he doing in Paris? It doesn’t make sense, something not right’s going on. What the hell’s Krim gone to do in Paris?’
‘How should I know what’s going on, Fouad?’
‘Mum,’ Fouad said, drawing a breath. ‘It’s him, I’m sure.’
Dounia’s eyes filled with tears. Her pain instantly turned to rage, and she slapped her son, who came closer and grabbed her shoulders.
‘Mum, it’s horrible but I’m sure of it. I can feel it. He’s the one who did that to Ferhat. I know you don’t want to confront the truth but he’s mad. Mum, he’s mad, you don’t realize. Mum, listen, Mum, he’s a monster. Fuck, I’m sure of it now, he’s the one who brought Krim to Paris. He’s preparing something, he’s preparing something even worse than—’
‘Stop!’ Dounia screamed. ‘Stop! How can you say that? Your own brother. How can you say such a thing? Ah …’
She nearly collapsed against the wall. Fouad held her steady and took her in his arms. Sensing that something was wrong, Rabia came to join them and suggested they go and have coffee on the ground floor. Fouad looked up at her and, so as not to give in to the dark impulse taking hold of him, did the opposite of what she commanded: he included Rabia in their hugs and, stroking the hair of the two women who’d watched him grow up, murmured: ‘That’s the best idea of the day so far, let’s get some coffee. And after that we mustn’t forget to go and vote, okay?’
But over Fouad’s shoulder, by the corridor, Rabia noticed a man in a black blazer staring at her; his face was impossible to identify because of the backlighting, but his stature and appearance seemed familiar. She turned around, hoping to discover someone signalling to her, but there was no one bu
t him in the long pink corridor. And when she made a step to one side to make sure that it was indeed her he was looking at, Rabia saw the man disappear with measured steps, hiding half his face with a ringed hand that shone with an evil gleam.
8
The Election of the Century
Socialist Party Headquarters, rue de Solferino, Paris, 12 p.m.
Police Commander Valérie Simonetti calmly crossed the blue-carpeted space of the press room. At the start of the millennium she had been the first woman to join the SGPR, the Security Group for the President of the Republic, which also ensured the security of all candidates for the highest office. Chaouch had done everything to reinforce her role in the campaign; he wanted her in the car and in the front row during walkabouts. She had blonde hair tied up in a chignon, but her face was open, juvenile and crafty. She was tall, at one metre eighty, and her pulse never exceeded sixty beats a minute; but that didn’t stop her smiling and being close to the people. All of this pleased Chaouch, who detested the square-jawed heavies at least as much as the expert snipers. On the eve of the first round he’d sacked his head of security, who had wanted to put men like that everywhere, and hired ‘Valkyrie Simonetti’ in his place, to give a more human face to his protection team and to promote a woman to a position where it wasn’t expected.
Chaouch’s communications director motioned her over and extricated himself from a jungle of phones. Serge Habib had the hollow cheeks, weak neck and slack skin of a man who has just followed a draconian but successful diet. He had lost his hand in a car accident a few years before: his stump, combined with the extraordinary energy he expended to make you forget it, had become one of the most singular images of the campaign. He explained to the security chief that the candidate had decided to delay his departure for the polling station.
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