Chourmo (19 page)

“OK,” I said, seriously.

Then I remembered Guitou's face. His angelic face. It was like a red flash in front of my eyes. His death had sullied me, as if I'd been spattered by his blood. How could I close my eyes now, without seeing his body? His body in the morgue. The thing that was on my mind wasn't whether or not I should tell Loubet the truth. It was the killers. I wanted those two scumbags for myself. I wanted to have the one who'd killed Guitou in front of me. Face to face. I hated him enough to shoot first.

That was the only thing in my head. Just that one thing.

The desire to kill.

Chourmo
, Montale!
Chourmo
!

Dammit, that's life!

“Hey, are you still there?”

“I was thinking.”

“Best not to, Montale. You might get the wrong idea. If you want my opinion, this case stinks. Don't forget, there must have been a reason they killed Hocine Draoui.”

“I was thinking that myself.”

“That's what I meant. Best to keep out of it. OK, will you be home if I need to reach you?”

“You know me. I never leave the house. Except to go fishing.”

M
ourad was ready. He stood there, stiffly, with a rucksack on his back and a satchel in his hand. I hung up.

“Did you call Four Eyes?”

“No, why?”

“But you were talking to a cop.”

“I was a cop myself, as I'm sure you know. They aren't all like Four Eyes.”

“Never met one who wasn't.”

“They do exist.”

He looked at me, fixedly. As he'd already done several times. He was trying to find a reason to trust me. It wasn't easy. I knew that kind of look pretty well. Most of the kids I'd met in the projects didn't know what an adult was. A real adult.

Thanks to the economic downturn, unemployment, racism, these kids thought of their fathers as losers. Men who'd lost their authority. Who lowered their eyes and their arms. Who refused to argue. Who didn't keep their word. Not even to give them the fifty francs they'd promised them for the weekend.

So these kids went out on the street. Abandoned by their fathers. With nothing to believe in. Their only rule was not to be what their fathers had been.

“Are we going?”

“I still have something to do,” I said. “That's why I came up here. Not just to phone.”

It was my turn to look at him. Mourad put down his satchel. His eyes filled with tears. He'd guessed what I was planning to do.

As I'd listened to the old man talking about Redouane, the idea had gradually grown in my mind. Especially when I remembered what Anselme had told me. Redouane had already been seen with the guy who was driving the BMW. The car the shots had come from. And Serge had been coming out of the Hamoudis'.

“Is this his room?” I asked.

“No, it's my parents' room. His is at the end.”

“I have to do this, Mourad. There are some things I need to know.”

“Why?”

“Because Serge was my friend,” I said, opening the door. “I don't like it when the people I like are killed, just like that.”

He still stood there, stiffly. “My mother isn't allowed in there. Not even to make the bed. Nobody is.”

The room was tiny. A little desk, with an old typewriter, a Japy. Various publications, in neat piles. Issues of
Al Ra'id
and
Le Musulman
—a monthly published by the Association of Islamic Students in France—and a pamphlet by Ahmed Deedat,
How Salman Rushdie Deceived the West
. A sixties corner unit with a single bed. A few shirts and pairs of jeans on hangers. A bedside table, with a copy of the Koran.

I sat down on the bed, to think. I leafed through the Koran. One of the pages was marked with a sheet of paper folded in four. I read the first line on the page: “Every people has its end, and when its end arrives, it will be able neither to postpone it nor to hurry it by a single moment.” A pleasant prospect, I thought. Then I unfolded the paper. It was a leaflet. A National Front leaflet. Shit! It was a good thing I was sitting! That was the last thing I'd have expected to find here.

The text was taken from a National Front statement that had appeared in
Minute-la-France
, No. 1552. “Thanks to the FIS, the Algerians are more and more like Arabs and less and less like Frenchmen. The FIS is in favor of the rights of blood. So are we! The FIS is against the integration of immigrants into French society. SO ARE WE!” The conclusion said: “The victory of the FIS is an unexpected opportunity to have another Iran on our doorstep.”

Why was Redouane keeping this leaflet inside the Koran? Where had he picked it up? I couldn't imagine extreme right-wing activists pushing them through letter boxes in the projects. But maybe I was wrong. The electoral setbacks suffered by the Communists in these neighborhoods had left the field wide open to all kinds of demagogues. The National Front had demagogues to spare, and it seemed they were even reaching out to immigrants now.

“You want to read this?” I asked Mourad, who'd sat down next to me.

“I read it over your shoulder.”

I folded the leaflet and put it back inside the Koran, on the same page. In the drawer of the bedside table, there were four five-hundred franc bills, a pack of condoms, a ballpoint pen, and two ID photos. I closed the drawer. Then I noticed some rolled prayer mats in a corner of the room. I unrolled them. Inside, there were more leaflets. About a hundred of them. They had a heading in Arabic, followed by a short text in French: “Demonstrate that your brains haven't turned to mush! Throw a stone, prime a bomb, lay a mine, hijack a plane!”

It wasn't signed, of course.

I knew enough. For the moment.

“Come on. Let's go.”

Mourad didn't move. He put his right hand behind the mattress, under the corner unit, and brought out a blue plastic bag. A garbage bag, rolled up.

“Don't you want to see this?”

Inside there was a .22 long rifle and a dozen bullets.

“Shit!”

 

I don't know how much time passed. No more than a minute, I suppose. But the minute felt like several centuries. Centuries before prehistory. Before fire. When there was nothing but darkness, menace, fear. An argument broke out on the floor above. The woman had a shrill voice. The man's voice was rough but weary. Echoes of life in the projects.

Mourad broke the silence. He sounded weary too.

“It's like that almost every night. He's unemployed. Long term. All he does is sleep. And drink. So she shouts at him.” Then he turned to me. “You don't think he killed him, do you?”

“I don't think anything, Mourad. But you have your suspicions, right? You're telling yourself it's possible.”

“No, I didn't say that! I can't believe it. My brother, doing that. But . . . Well, the fact is, I'm afraid for him. Afraid he'll get involved in things that are over his head, and one day he'll . . . use something like this.”

“I think he's already involved. Up to his neck.”

The pistol was between us, on the bed. I've always hated firearms. Even when I was a cop. I always hesitated to take my service pistol. I knew that all you had to do was pull the trigger. Death was at your fingertips. One shot, and another person's life might be over. One bullet for Guitou. Three for Serge. When you've fired once, you can fire three times. Or more. And start over again. Kill again.

“That's why as soon as I get home from school, I check to see if it's there. As long as it is, I tell myself he can't do anything stupid. You ever killed anyone?”

“Never. Not even a rabbit. Never fired at anyone either. The only time I ever fired a gun, apart from at fairs, was in training. In fact, I scored high marks. I was a pretty good shot.”

“But not when you were a cop?”

“No, not when I was a cop. I'd never have shot anyone. Not even a real scumbag. Well, yes, maybe a scumbag. In the legs. My colleagues knew it. My bosses too, of course. The others, I don't know. I never had to save my skin. By killing, I mean.”

I wasn't lacking, though, in the desire to kill. But I didn't say that to Mourad. It was bad enough knowing I had that in me sometimes. That madness. Because, goddammit, I wanted to kill the man who'd killed Guitou with a single bullet. It wouldn't change anything, of course. There'd be other killers. There always were. But it'd make me feel better. Maybe.

“You should take this thing away,” Mourad said. “You must know where to get rid of it. I'd prefer it if I knew it wasn't here anymore.”

“OK.”

I put the gun back in the plastic bag. Mourad stood up and started pacing, his hands in his pockets.

“Anselme says Redouane's not a bad person. But he may become dangerous. That he's only like this because he has nothing else to hold on to. He flunked the technical school certificate, and then he did little jobs. The electricity board, for example, but in that job he didn't have any . . . what do they call it?”

“Job security.”

“Yes, that's it, job security. No prospects.”

“It's true.”

“Then he sold fruit, on Rue Longue. He also distributed
Le 13
. You know, the free newspaper. Just jobs like that. In between jobs, he'd hang around on the stairs, smoking, listening to rap. He used to dress like MC Solaar! That's when he started doing stupid things. Getting into drugs. At first, when my mother went to see him at Les Baumettes, he forced her to bring him dope. Right there in the visitors' room! And she did it, can you imagine? He said if she didn't, he'd kill all of us when he got out.”

“Don't you want to sit down?”

“No, I'm better standing.” He threw me a sidelong look. “It's hard to talk about Redouane. He's my brother, and I love him. When he first started working and had a bit of money, he'd blow it all on us. He'd take Naïma and me to the movies. At the Capitole, you know, on the Canebière. He'd buy us popcorn. And we'd come home by taxi! Like kings.”

He clicked his fingers as he said that, and smiled. It must have been great, those times. The three kids, strolling along the Canebière. The older brother and the younger brother, with their sister in the middle. Proud of her, of course.

Living like kings. That had been our dream too, Manu, Ugo and I. Tired of working for nothing plus a few centimes an hour, while the guy you worked for made a packet out of your hard labor. “We aren't whores,” Ugo would say. “We're not going to let those jerks screw us over.” The thing that drove Manu crazy was the centimes in the hourly rate. The centimes were like an extra bone to chew on. I was like them, I didn't want a bone, I wanted meat.

How many drugstores and gas stations had we held up? I couldn't remember. But we had quite a tally. We knew the ropes. At first in Marseilles, then all over the region. We weren't trying to break any records. Just enough to live an easy life for two or three weeks. And then we'd start again. We enjoyed throwing our money around and showing off. We liked to dress well. We even went to Cirillo's, an Italian tailor on Avenue Foch, and had suits made to measure. Choosing the material, the style. Going for fittings. With a straight crease in the pants. And Italian shoes, of course. Class!

One afternoon, I could still remember, we decided to drive down to San Remo. Just to buy new clothes and shoes. A mechanic friend of ours, José, who was crazy about racing cars, had lent us an Alpine coupé. Leather seats and wooden dashboard. A masterpiece. We stayed three days. We gave ourselves the works. A good hotel, girls, restaurants, nightclubs, and in the early hours of the morning, as many chips as possible at the casino.

The good life. The belle époque.

It wasn't the same these days. Stealing a thousand francs from a supermarket without getting collared three days later was quite an achievement. That was why the drug trade had prospered. It offered a bigger return for less risk. Becoming a dealer was a must.

Two years ago, we'd caught a dealer named Bachir. His big dream had been to open his own bar. To finance that, he'd sold heroin. “I'd buy a gram for eight, nine hundred francs,” he'd told us. “I'd cut it, and resell it for almost a million. Sometimes, I was making four thousand profit a day . . . ”

He'd soon forgotten all about the bar, and had started working for a big shot. A top dealer. The split was fifty-fifty, but he was the one who took all the risks. Walking around with the packs, waiting. One night, he refused to hand over the take, to get the guy to agree to a seventy-thirty split. The next day, feeling pleased with himself, he was drinking an aperitif at the Bar des Platanes, in Le Merlan. A guy had come in and fired two bullets into his legs. One in each leg. That was where we'd come to pick him up. We booked him, and managed to get him sent down for two and a half years. But he hadn't squealed about his suppliers. “I'm from around here,” he'd said. “I can't squeal. But I can tell you my life story, if you like . . . ” I hadn't wanted to listen. I knew his life story.

Mourad was still speaking. Redouane's life was like Bachir's and hundreds of others.

“When Redouane got into drugs, he didn't take us to the movies anymore. He'd just give us money. ‘Here, buy whatever you like.' Five hundred francs, a thousand. Once, I bought some Reeboks with what he gave me. They were great. But deep down, I didn't really like the idea. It wasn't like they were a gift from him. Knowing where the money came from wasn't so great. The day Redouane was arrested, I threw them away.”

How was it, I wondered, that children from the same family could go in such different directions? The girls, I could understand. They wanted to succeed because it was their way of gaining their freedom. Of being independent. Marrying who they wanted to marry. Getting out of North Marseilles one day. Their mothers helped them. But the boys? When had the gulf opened up between Mourad and Redouane? How? Why? Life was full of questions like that, questions without answers. And precisely in those cases where there were no answers, there was sometimes room for a little happiness. It was like thumbing a nose at the statistics.