Chourmo (9 page)

The light came on. A single bulb hanging by a thread from the ceiling. A white, crude, harsh light that made the place look even more squalid. I turned slowly, blinking, my FNAC bag in my hand. Saadna was aiming a hunting rifle directly at me. He took a step forward, dragging his limp leg. He'd had polio and it had never mended.

“You came by the canal, eh?” he said with a ugly smile. “Like a thief. Have you taken up burglary, Fabio?”

“I wouldn't get rich here,” I said sarcastically.

Saadna and I made no secret of our hatred for each other. He was the archetypal gypsy. Non-Gypsies were all jerks. Every time a young Gypsy got into trouble, it was of course the non-Gypsies' fault. For centuries, we'd persecuted them. We were only there to cause them problems. We'd been invented by the devil, to piss off God the Father who, in his infinite goodness, had created the Gypsy in his own image. The Roma. Man. Since then, the devil had made things even worse, by bringing thousands of Arabs to France, just to piss off the Gypsies even more.

With his beard and long salt-and-pepper hair, he liked to think of himself as a wise old man. The younger ones often asked him for advice. It was always the worst kind of advice. Inspired by hatred, scorn. Cynicism. Through them, he was avenging himself for the bad leg he'd had since the age of twelve. Without the affection he felt for him, Arno might never have done so many stupid things. He'd never have ended up in prison. And he'd still be alive.

When Arno's father, Chano, died, Serge and I had intervened on his behalf to get him granted leave. He was really upset, and was determined to be at the funeral. I'd even flirted with the social worker—“hotter than the youth organizer,” Arno had said—to get her to intervene too, personally. The leave was granted, then withdrawn, on the express orders of the warden, apparently because Arno was stupid. He was only authorized to see his father, one last time, at the morgue. Between two gendarmes. When they got there, they wouldn't remove his handcuffs. So Arno refused to see his father. “I didn't want him to see me with those things on my wrists,” he'd written to us soon afterwards.

On his return, he broke down, kicked up an almighty fuss, and found himself in solitary again. “Look, you guys, I'm fed up with this shit, people treating me without respect, all those things. The walls, the contempt, the insults . . . It stinks! I've looked at the ceiling two thousand times, and I've had enough.”

When he came out of solitary, he slit his wrists.

Saadna lowered his eyes. And his rifle.

“Honest people come in through the main door. Would it have hurt you to come say hello to me?” He looked around the room and his eyes came to rest on the FNAC bag. “What have you got in there?”

“Papers that Serge doesn't need anymore. He was killed. This afternoon. Right in front of me. You'll be getting a visit from the cops tomorrow.”

“Killed?”

“Any idea what Serge was up to?”

“I need a drink. Follow me.”

 

Even if he'd known anything, Saadna wouldn't have told me. All the same, he didn't need much prodding to start talking, and he didn't launch into any convoluted explanations, like he did when he was lying. That should have surprised me. But I was too much in a hurry to leave his rat hole.

He'd filled two dusty glasses with a foul-smelling brew he called whisky. I hadn't touched it. Hadn't even clinked glasses. Saadna was one of those people I didn't even clink glasses with.

Serge had come to see him the previous fall, to ask if he could stay in Arno's shack. “I need it for a while,” Serge had said. “I need a hiding place.” He'd tried to get him to talk, but to no avail. “You're not in any danger, but the less you know, the better.” They didn't see much of each other, rarely talked. About two weeks ago, Serge had given him a thousand francs and asked him to make sure nobody was following him when he came back at night.

Saadna hadn't much liked Serge either. Youth worker, cop—we were all the same fucking bunch of jerks to him. But Serge had been good to Arno. He wrote to him, sent him packages, went to see him. Saadna mentioned that now, in his usual spiteful tone, to make it quite clear that he made a distinction between Serge and me. I didn't say anything. I didn't have any desire to suck up to Saadna. How I behaved was up to me, and my conscience.

It was true I hadn't written much to Arno. Letters have never been my thing. The only person I ever wrote to a lot was Magali. When she was at teachers' training college in Caen. I'd tell her about Marseilles, Les Goudes. She missed it a lot. But words aren't my forte. I'm not even very good at talking. I mean, about what I really feel. Idle chatter I'm fine with, like everyone in Marseilles.

But every two weeks, I went to see Arno. First, at the young people's institution in Luynes, near Aix en Provence. Then at Les Baumettes. A month later, they put him in the infirmary because he wasn't eating anything and was spending all his time on the toilet, having a crap. He was emptying himself. I'd brought him some Pepitos, he loved those.

“I'll tell you what it is about Pepitos,” he said. “One day, when I was—what?—eight or nine, I was hanging out with my brothers, the older ones. They'd scrounged a smoke from a
payo
and were smoking and talking dirty. Obviously, I found it fascinating. Suddenly Le Pacho said, ‘Marco, how many calories is a natural yoghurt?' Of course, Marco had no idea. At the age of fifteen, he didn't eat a whole lot of yoghurt. Next, Le Pacho asked, ‘What about a hard-boiled egg?' ‘Get to the point!' the others said, not sure where he was going with this.

“Le Pacho had heard that when you fuck, you burn up eighty calories. And that's the same as a hard-boiled egg, or a Danone. ‘So eat an egg or a yoghurt,' he said, very seriously, ‘and you'll come.' We all laughed our heads off. Marco didn't want to be left behind. ‘I heard that if you can't get it up, you eat fifteen Pepitos and it works fine!' Since then, I've been eating Pepitos! You never know! I know what you're going to say, not much use for it in here. You saw what the nurse looked like!”

We'd both laughed.

I suddenly needed air. I had no desire to talk to Saadna about Arno. Or about Serge. Saadna soiled everything he talked about, everything he touched, everything around him. And the people he talked to as well. He'd agreed to Serge coming here not because of his friendship with Arno but because knowing he was in the shit made him feel as if he was a kindred spirit.

I stood up.

“You haven't touched your drink,” he said.

“You know, Saadna. I never drink with guys like you.”

“You'll live to regret it.”

And he drained my glass in one go.

 

In the car, I lit the ceiling light and had a look at the letter I'd taken. It had been posted on Saturday, from the Colbert post office in the center of town. On the back, the sender, instead of putting his or her name and address, had written, in a clumsy hand, “Because the cards have been so badly dealt, we are reaching a level of chaos at which life becomes impossible.” I shivered. Inside, there was a single sheet of paper torn from an exercise book, in the same handwriting. Two short sentences. I read them feverishly, driven by the urgency of their cry for help. “I can't stand it anymore. I need to see you. Pavie.”

Pavie. My God! She was all we needed.

I
t wasn't until I indicated a right turn onto Rue de la Belle-de-Mai that I realized I was being followed. A black Safrane had been tailing me, keeping at a fair distance, but never losing sight of me. On Boulevard Fleming, it had even overtaken me after a red light. When it had stopped next to me, I'd felt eyes on me. I'd glanced toward the car. But it had smoked windows, protecting the driver from prying eyes. All I'd seen was the reflection of my own face.

The Safrane then drove on in front of me, scrupulously keeping to the speed limit in town. That should have alerted me. At night, no one keeps to the speed limit. Not even me in my old Renault 5. But I was too busy trying to put my thoughts in order to worry about being followed. Besides, it had simply never occurred to me that anyone might be tailing me.

I'd been thinking about the way circumstances come together, the way, for example, you wake up in the morning with not a care in the world, and by nighttime your cousin's son is missing, a buddy of yours has been shot down in front of your eyes, a kid you barely know befriends you, and you're forced to talk to a guy you have no desire to see. And your memories grab you by the throat. Magali. Manu, Ugo. Arno too. I was reminded of him by his ex-girlfriend, who was permanently high. Pavie, little Pavie, who'd had too many dreams. And had realized all too soon that life is a bad movie, in which the fact that it's in Technicolor doesn't improve the story. Pavie, who was calling for help, and Serge, who'd never be able to answer that call now.

That's how life is. Our paths crisscross. We make choices that lead us along roads different from the ones we'd hoped to take, depending on whether we turned right rather than left. Whether we said yes to one thing and not another. It wasn't the first time I'd found myself in a situation like this. I sometimes got the feeling I always chose the wrong direction. But would the other road have been better? Or even different?

I doubted it. But I wasn't sure. I'd read somewhere, in a cheap novel, that “men are led by the blind man inside them.” That was it, that was the way we moved forward. Blindly. Choice was just an illusion. A trick that life used to get us to swallow its bitter pill. It wasn't choice that determined everything, but how open we were to other people.

When Gélou had arrived that morning, my life had been empty. She'd set off a chain reaction. The world around me had begun moving again, like an engine being started. And backfiring, as usual.

Damn!

A glance in the rearview mirror showed me that I was still being followed. Who by? And why? The questions were pointless, because I had no way of answering them. I assumed I'd been followed since I left Saadna's. But it could just as easily have been since I said goodbye to Anselme. Or since I'd come out of the station house. Or since I'd left home. No, it couldn't have been since I left home, that made no sense at all. But at some point since Serge was killed, yes, that was plausible.

I started the Bob Marley cassette again, with
Slave Driver
, to put me in the right mood, and on Rue Honorat, alongside the railroad track, I accelerated to 43 mph. The Safrane hardly reacted. I went back to my normal speed.

Pavie. She'd been there at Arno's trial. She hadn't protested, hadn't cried, hadn't said a word. Proud, like Arno. But after that, she'd plunged back into the drug scene, with all the little hustles you were forced into to get a fix. Her life with Arno had been just a brief happy episode. Arno had been her last hope. But her last hope hadn't been enough to cope with all the shit. He'd slipped, and she'd plunged headlong.

On Place d'Aix, the Safrane went through a yellow light. Good, I told myself, it's nearly eleven, and I'm feeling hungry. And thirsty. I turned onto Rue Sainte-Barbe, without signaling, but without accelerating either. Then Rue Colbert, Rue Méry and Rue Caisserie, toward the old neighborhood, my childhood territory. Where my parents had lived when they left Italy. Where Gélou was born. Where I'd known Manu and Ugo. And Lole, who still seemed to haunt the streets with her presence.

On Place de Lenche, I parked the way everyone did here, somewhere I shouldn't, my right wheel up against the front step of a small building. There was a parking space available on the other side, but I wanted the guy following me to think I wouldn't be gone for long, which was why I hadn't parked properly. That's the way we are here. Sometimes, even if it's just for fifteen minutes, people prefer to double park, with the hazard lights on.

The Safrane appeared as I was locking my door. I ignored it. I lit a cigarette, and strode back up Place de Lenche, turned right onto Rue des Accoules, then right again onto Rue Fonderie-Vieille. Down a flight of steps, and I was back on Rue Caisserie. All I had to do now was get back to Place de Lenche, to see what had become of the guy following me.

He'd shamelessly taken the space I'd left free, parking impeccably between two other cars. The driver's window was open, and smoke wafted out. He didn't seem to be in any hurry. I wasn't worried about him. Cars like that even had stereos. The Safrane had a Var license number. I made a note of it. It didn't tell me anything right now. But tomorrow was another day.

Time to eat, I told myself.

 

When I reached Chez Félix, two couples were just finishing dinner. Félix himself was sitting at a table toward the rear of the restaurant, his Gitanes filters on one side, his
pastis
on the other, reading
The Pieds Nickelés in Deauville
. His favorite reading matter. In fact, his only reading matter. He didn't even bother with the newspapers. He had a collection of Pieds Nickelés and Bibi Fricotin comics, and enjoyed them whenever he had five minutes to spare.

“Céleste!” he called, when he saw me come in. “We have a guest!”

His wife came out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on her black apron, which she never took off until the restaurant closed. She'd put on another six pounds at least. Where it was most conspicuous. On the chest and the buttocks. Just seeing her, you felt like eating.

Her
bouillabaisse
was one of the best in Marseilles. Scorpion fish, gurnard, conger, dory, angler fish, weever, pandora, rainbow wrasse . . . A few crabs, too, and sometimes a lobster. Only rock fish. That's what made it different. And for the sauce, she had a particular genius for combining garlic and peppers with potatoes and sea urchin. But her
bouillabaisse
was never on the menu. You had to phone regularly to know when she was making it. Because you needed at least seven or eight people for a good
bouillabaisse
. So that you could make a copious amount of it and put in as many kinds of fish as possible. The only people there when she served it were friends and connoisseurs. Even Honorine had to admit Céleste was good. “Well, you know, it's not my profession . . . ”