A woman who had just heard the news put her hand on her mouth and staggered. A student held her up and helped her to sit down so that she could fan herself with the supplement of Le Monde, which he had been calmly reading a few minutes earlier.
Nazir took out his mobile and saw that he had thirty calls from Farid in his absence, four from his mother and, above all, one from Fouad. His surprise was all the greater as they hadn’t spoken on the phone or face to face since their father’s funeral three years earlier.
He stretched and bit the flesh of his lips while avoiding his reflection in the window. There was almost no white in his eyes: his pupils, which were permanently dilated by a rare illness, gave the impression that his eyes were made of some thick, unhealthy matter, that if one day he was to cry, his tears would probably be black, a sort of muddy oil flowing down his cheeks. But crying was not on Nazir’s agenda.
A girl in a blazer and sailor’s t-shirt caught his attention: she’d been staring at him from inside the lift. Her slightly over-arched eyebrows and the fine and arrogant lips of her mouth amused Nazir until he noticed that the electronic noticeboard above her read, ‘Out of Order’.
There was a two-minute wait, followed by an inaudible and devastated announcement on the intercom, and then a siren that sounded like an ululation. The metro wasn’t going to start up again. The network was paralysed. Nazir got out and hailed a taxi. He reached Porte d’Orleans fifteen minutes later. Some police cars were driving by at full speed; he feared that roadblocks had already been set up around Paris. Fares called him on his mobile, and Nazir was going to answer when he noticed the Maybach’s gleaming fuselage, parked on a metered space. He knocked twice on the driver’s window, and Fares got out to open the boot for him.
‘So weird, all these cops around, something must have happened.’
Fares wanted to shake his hand, greet him properly before speaking to him about what had happened to his brother and what had to be done to help him.
But Nazir stopped him with a wave of the hand. ‘The effusions can come later.’
He then took his place in the back seat, where he immediately carried out mysterious transfers of chips with his three mobile phones.
‘Are we off?’ Fares asked. Despite Nazir’s bad mood, he wasn’t unhappy to finally have some company.
‘Head for the border,’ Nazir confirmed, licking his lips. With that, the Maybach 57S, licence number 4-CD-188, which belonged to an Algerian diplomatic consul, headed towards the east-bound motorway under the dazzling sun of that tumultuous first Sunday in May.
To be continued …
Savages- The Wedding Page 22