But Rabia didn’t pick up. Not one of his four calls. He left a message on her voicemail, where he described what he saw.
‘Wallah, all Montreynaud’s here, they’ve all come down to see Chaouch voting! It’s just so crazy, Rabia, if you could see this … Completely crazy …’
He sought the approval and enthusiasm of his two passengers. They had left their seats and were nodding in admiration. Bouzid even thought he could see tears of joy running down the wrinkled olive cheeks of the more smiley of the two mates. He reflected that you could never really be sure with old men: age made them emotional. But he changed his mind when he himself was suddenly submerged by a tide of sobs, sobs that he hadn’t known since the end of the seventies, during the epic adventure of the Saint-Etienne football team: collective happiness, the desire to kiss strangers who, in the warm madness of the moment, turned out to be, to have always been, our brothers.
He went up to the old men and their shiny eyes. He took off his cap and passed his finger along the vein on his head. For the first time in years it wasn’t anger but joy that made it bulge.
Paris, 3.15 p.m.
When Krim finally knocked on the apartment door through which he’d heard Nazir shouting a few hours earlier, he realized this was a mistake and that it would be best to return to Saint-Etienne to save his mother himself. But the door opened to a red-haired guy with a goatee, who stared at him with his eyebrows raised.
‘What, you’re Krim?’’
‘Yes,’ he replied in his most assured voice. ‘Where’s Nazir?
What are you going to do to my mother?’
The guy with the goatee didn’t reply and led Krim into the living room. He was wearing a dirty t-shirt and seemed to have woken up just ten minutes ago.
‘You want some coffee?’
But his mind had already moved on to something else. He took his phone and exiled himself in the kitchen, leaving Krim to devour the nails off his bloody hands.
The guy with the goatee came back into the living room dressed and ready to leave. Krim thought his heart was going to give out.
‘Well, you coming? It’s okay.’
‘What’s okay?’
‘Come on, let’s go.’
‘I want to speak to him,’ Krim shouted. ‘If I can’t speak to him—’
‘What are you going to do?’ the redhead snapped, giving him a hard stare.
They went down to the underground garage and got into the redhead’s car. They drove without speaking for ten minutes, until they’d left the ring road. A sign at the motorway exit indicated GROGNY, and on the endless avenue traversing that town, Krim noticed several cars with Algerian, Moroccan and Tunisian flags.
‘Where are we?’ he asked in a panic.
The guy with the goatee took a big padded envelope from the back seat and handed it to Krim, shaking his head. ‘So,’ he finally said, ‘you know how to use it? You should have been training. You’ve trained, right? It’s a—’
‘I know, a nine milimetre calibre with a fourteen bullet magazine. I’ve got the same at home. But I don’t understand, who do I have to shoot? I want to speak to my mother.’
‘The nose,’ the driver said. ‘You aim for the nose. And above all don’t look at the roof, okay? There’ll be marksmen on the roofs all around. One with binoculars, another with a gun and telemeter. I’m telling you so you won’t be tempted to see what it’s like. Do you understand what I’m saying?’
Krim nodded, mustering all his strength to stop from shaking. On the wooden butt of the pistol, four letters were engraved: S, R, A, F.
‘Fucking hell,’ the redhead blurted for no reason.
He seemed on the verge of turning the car round. When the light turned green, Krim watched him bite his nails.
‘I’m not getting out of this car if I don’t speak to my mother first.’
‘Stop it! You’re getting out of the car and you’re doing what Nazir has paid you to do.’
‘Call Nazir,’ Krim retorted. ‘Tell him I’m not moving if I haven’t had my mother on the phone.’
‘Go to hell!’
The car started off again gently and passed in front of two white-gloved policemen blocking access to a street so crowded it looked like the end of a football match in Saint-Etienne. The traffic was stopped in the whole neighbourhood – people were flocking, crossing the boulevard, slowing down buses draped with tricolour flags. A group of old bare-footed Berber women wearing blue make-up sang songs in a little square, accompanying each other with darbukas.
The redhead called Nazir and explained the situation. He hung up a few seconds later, waited for an endless minute and dialled another number. ‘I’m putting him on,’ he suddenly said.
Krim took the phone and recognized Mouloud Benbaraka’s voice.
‘Your mother’s fine. Nothing will happen to her if you do what you have to do.’
‘I want to speak to her.’
‘She’s asleep.’
‘I want to speak to her. I want to hear her and I want you to take her to my cousin Fouad. As long as she’s not safe I’m not doing anything.’
Krim heard his mother’s voice, which was indeed sleepy, a bit stoned, but safe and sound.
‘Krim, what’s going on? Darling, what’s …’
‘Well, you’ve heard her,’ Benbaraka spat after taking the phone back. ‘Now stop fucking around.’
He hung up. The redhead’s fist was clenched, and he looked in the rear-view mirror.
‘Okay, you reassured? We’re going there now.’
‘I’m not moving if I don’t have a photo of her with Fouad.’
A series of nervous tics took over the redhead’s face. One of these tics lifted his chin and the goatee with it. He called Nazir and explained the problem. Krim could hear Nazir’s shouting, which made the phone vibrate. He was terrified.
‘It’s okay,’ the redhead declared as he hung up, ‘you’ll have the photo. But we’ve got to hurry now. Come on, get out of the car and get ready.’
‘For what?’ Krim asked.
He obviously knew the answer, knew perfectly well without ever having put it into words.
The dense crowd did it for him.
‘Cha-ouch, Cha-ouch, Cha-ouch!’
The sound of chanting surprised Krim as they threaded their way through the crowd. It was like a wedding.
The guy with the goatee brandished a press card to get through more quickly. He was also carrying a big rucksack with a microphone that recorded the sounds of the highly charged street. The security barricade at the entrance to the town hall was made up of about twenty riot police officers and yellow barriers. There must have been tens of thousands of people around the building. Chaouch’s bodyguards had mixed with the crowd; they made up the second circle of protection. One of them stared at Krim, who thought he was saved. The work of these men consisted of spotting suspicious faces. Krim knew that his was, but the redhead with the goatee exchanged a look with the bodyguard who’d noticed him and pushed Krim to the front row.
Suddenly murmurs spread through the sea of these elated faces. People turned around to pass on the news:
‘He’s voted! He’s voted!’
And it was then that Krim saw the candidate appear on the steps. He was smaller than on TV, but his entire person was beaming, exuding an air of majesty and vigour.
The crowd shouted, ‘Cha-ouch, Cha-ouch, Cha-ouch!’
Valérie Simonetti brought the wrist microphone to her mouth and murmured, ‘Walkabout, walkabout.’
Chaouch came over to shake hands. A woman fainted behind the barrier opposite Krim’s. Chaouch turned round, and Valérie, who opened the way and moved forward like a crab, gestured to him to continue. Behind Chaouch was another bodyguard, the Kevlar, who scanned faces one by one. On the roofs of the buildings on the square, the marksmen had nothing to report. In truth they were focused on the women in burkas sprinkled throughout the crowd: Chaouch had expressly forbidden that they be refused passage, so as
not to ‘ostracize them even more’.
The candidate therefore continued to shake hands until he reached Krim, his right hand feverishly held out above the blue-lined shoulder of a policewoman. Blood throbbed in Krim’s temples, but his left hand was sure. It was the one with his Swatch, the one by which his life was seven seconds late. Was that a good thing? Was it not better to shoot with the one that was seven seconds fast? And how would he get out of this? Would they shoot him down before he even had the time to lift his weapon?
He remembered the sessions with Fat Momo, the extraordinarily easy handling of the 9mm, its minimal recoil, its comforting weight.
‘I want to see the photo!’ he cried on the edge of tears.
The redhead didn’t reply. He looked at his phone and pushed Krim against the barrier.
‘You’ll never see your mother again if you don’t hurry up! You hear me? You’ll never see your mother again! So get on with it!’
‘I don’t trust you,’ Krim implored in a child’s voice. He was now crying as though his heart would break.
‘You’ve got no choice!’ the redhead screamed.
Krim saw that he was right. He had no choice. He looked for Chaouch’s nose. It was astonishing, that nose, it was straight, too straight, the nostrils were thick but lacked the Kabyle bump, the Nerrouche bump.
Suddenly it was too late: the candidate had missed Krim’s hand and was already moving towards the next one.
The redhead shoved Krim a little further into the crowd. He gave him a dark look and pushed him to elbow his way through. ‘Go on!’ he shouted. ‘Go on!’
Commander Simonetti pressed on her earpiece and winked to the candidate who, although side on, spotted her and mentally prepared to refuse the hands that followed. A little girl held up by her father was leaning forward to kiss him. Chaouch took the little girl in his arms, over the security barrier. The father took a photo.
Krim found himself right against this chubby man who was taking loads of photos. Suddenly he felt something on his thigh underneath his tracksuit. It felt like warm slugs were crawling in his leg hair.
He had pissed himself.
The sweaty redhead started to jab at his ribs. Krim jostled the photographer father and noticed his little daughter’s bare, caramel-coloured legs as she went back over the barrier. The blonde bodyguard was helping the girl regain her father’s arms right at the moment Krim’s palm brushed Chaouch. He thought of the photos of his mother with Mouloud Benbaraka, he thought of his mother’s naked body in the bluish semi-darkness of her bedroom.
He lifted his arm, protected on the right by the redhead’s silhouette and on the left by the little girl’s body. He closed his eyes for half a second and reopened them on Chaouch’s. In the apotheosis of this afternoon, which shimmered with sunlit spangles, Krim realized that fear also inhabited the eyes of the gods.
He fired only one shot, and had the time to appreciate its neatness and perfection. The bullet hit the candidate’s left cheek and made him fall flat on his back.
In the chaos that followed, Krim heard nothing more. Blows rained down on him. He suffered from the first one, but those that followed seemed to strike a different body, his own body in truth, but a freed one, finally freed from the tyranny of its nerve endings. From the ground where he had been thrown, he saw a crowd of twisted, hateful faces, of bloody and pitiless eyes.
An immense blonde woman suddenly tore away the security barrier and, with superhuman strength, scooped Krim up from the ground where he’d collapsed. She was soon assisted by three men including the one who’d let him pass. They kept Krim a few centimetres from the ground, his face to the tarmac where the sun crushed the slightest spot of moisture, just like down south that previous summer, just like that, like the sea and the sun gazing at each other during the very rich hours of the afternoon. And while he was being brutally treated, while there was talk of lynching and hospital, Krim could see it once again, the sun’s majestic 3.30 p.m. column of silvery reflections, a column he followed because Aurélie had followed it, as far as beyond the buoys, as far as that strange zone where coral suddenly emerged beneath their bare feet, darkening the turquoise water as if the coral were sleeping sea monsters.
Saint-Etienne, 3.30 p.m.
Dounia got up from the side of the bed and switched on the TV perched above them, hoping that Zoulikha was genuinely asleep. But she woke up suddenly and asked her to switch it off again. Dounia obeyed and approached her big sister. She was putting her hand on her forehead to see if she still had a fever when a scream from the neighbouring bedroom eviscerated the peaceful slumber of the floor. It was followed by a second scream, and a third, and a commotion that was so incongruous in these light pink halls that it sounded like a police raid on a nursery. Unsteady on her feet, Dounia inched towards the corridor and saw two nursing assistants running in opposite directions shouting:
‘Chaouch’s been shot! Chaouch’s been shot!’
She followed them like a ghost and had to stop halfway and lean on the handle of a stretcher to catch her breath. Her first reflex was to phone Rabia, but she didn’t pick up. She called her landline, she called Luna, she called Nazir, she called Fouad and finally Slim.
When Slim answered, she began to cough in a sickly and phlegmy way, mixed with hiccups, sobs and cries. She could hear Slim’s scarcely stifled voice on the phone, the voice of her youngest child who was screaming ‘Mum, Mum, Mum’, but she couldn’t stop coughing, she was now even expectorating some blood.
A nurse paralysed in front of the TV at the end of the corridor finally came to her aid and reassured her son on the phone, in a voice broken by sobs.
At the other end of the city, Fouad hadn’t heard his mobile vibrate: for the past fifteen minutes he’d been knocking on the door to Rabia’s flat, where he’d been led by a bad premonition. A BMW had sped off just as he’d parked his car at the foot of her block, making him worry even more. He knocked louder and tried the other door on the landing. There was no reply.
He finally went down to the basement, thinking of what he’d heard about Krim getting up to strange things down there. Each cellar unit had a number listed on a dilapidated noticeboard where Fouad managed to make out Rabia’s name: Nerrouche-Bounaim. He followed the long neon-lit corridor, went through a few fire-safety doors and heard some noise behind the wooden door of the little room he was looking for. When he knocked, the door opened on its own … onto Fat Momo, who was slumped in the shadow, his face lit by a luminous screen.
‘What the fuck are you doing here?’
Fat Momo got up and tried to escape. Fouad held him back firmly and looked around the small room, which looked like Ali Baba’s cave. There were boxes of shoes piled up in columns, half a dozen game consoles, and two flatscreen TVs.
‘Momo, what’s all this?’
‘Fuck, I’m sorry, we didn’t want to—’
‘What are you up to here? Answer me, for fuck’s sake!’
‘Nothing, nothing, just a bit of … of business, you see, but nothing serious. It was Krim, with the money he got from his cousin. We bought some things and we sell them, we make a little profit but nothing much, I swear.’
Fat Momo was undeniably sincere, but Fouad noticed that he’d moved in front of another pile of boxes.
‘What are you hiding in there?’
He pushed Fat Momo aside and discovered the barrel of a weapon jutting out of an untidily rolled bath towel.
‘It’s nothing, I swear, we were just training to shoot, you know, in the woods, it was just to pass the time.’
Fouad took his head in his hands. He looked at his mobile, saw the number and variety of missed calls, and realized something had happened. Dizzy, he almost fell flat on his back but was held up by Fat Momo, whose horrified plump face had begun to shine from perspiration. Fouad got his breath back and looked at the screen that Fat Momo hadn’t had the time to put on pause. It was a shooting game, from the shooter’s viewpoint: the barrel of a machine gun was traine
d on a patch of silent mangrove trees, which remained deserted for a few more seconds before a camouflaged soldier appeared suddenly and fired in the viewer’s direction, gradually covering the screen with blood.
Paris, at the same moment
Nazir had seen one of his mobiles vibrate on top of his harpsichord. He’d paid no attention to it, as he’d been too engrossed in the score of ‘The Savages’, that piece by Rameau that he’d been working on unsuccessfully for weeks.
He finally closed the lid and ran his hand over his chin. In a week, his hair hadn’t grown enough for him to know if it was going to go curly; he felt somewhat sorry about this. He walked over to the window of his bedroom, which was empty except for the golden instrument, a campbed and a stuffed macaque. The Haussmann-era street noise was shut out by the double glazing he’d installed. But a movement attracted his attention to the fourth floor of the opposite building. Through the window, composed of red and green panes, his young neighbour was having a piano lesson with someone hidden from sight by a thick beige curtain. The sun rid itself of cloud, and from a darkness suddenly streaked with oblique bright strips where the dust passed, Nazir enjoyed the sight of the little girl’s determined elbow and the velvet of her right sleeve stitched with tiny plastic mirrors that glittered when she rolled towards the high notes.
After one last glance at his faithful stuffed monkey, Nazir went down with his small maroon suitcase and took the metro to meet Fares and the car that would drive him out of Paris. He could have called a taxi, but he wanted to be in the company of others at that fateful moment.
The metro stopped for a long time at Saint-Michel, in front of the lift that went up to place Saint-André-des-Arts. People had begun to run in every direction, to share the news, and to stop each other from fainting.
Nazir lifted up his black jacket collar and took off his headphones to hear properly what was being said around him.
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