Chourmo (25 page)

Babar whistled in admiration.

I
managed to persuade Loubet to meet with me at L'Oursin, near the Vieux-Port. One of the best places for oysters, sea urchins, clams and sea squirts. That's what I ordered when I went in. With a bottle of Cassis. A white wine, from Fontcreuse. Not surprisingly, Loubet was in a bad mood.

“I don't care what order you tell it in,” he said. “But I need to know everything you know. All right? I like you, Montale, but you're really starting to be a pain in the butt.”

“Can I ask just one question?”

He smiled.

“Did you really think I'd killed Fabre?”

“No. Not you, and not her.”

“Why did you do that number on me, then?”

“In her case, to scare her. In yours, to stop you jerking me around.”

“Have you made any progress?”

“You said one question. That's the third. So now I'm listening. First of all, I want to know what you were doing with Pertin.”

“All right, let me start with that. But it has nothing to do with Guitou, Hocine Draoui, Fabre, or any of that.”

So I told him the whole story. From the time I arrived in La Bigotte—without mentioning the real reason I was there—and witnessed Serge's murder, down to the death of Saadna. And my little conversation with Pertin.

“OK,” I said. “So Serge was gay, maybe even a pedophile, who knows? I don't give a damn. He was an honest guy. Non-violent. He loved people. With the innocence of a true believer. He had a real faith in mankind, without God's help. The kids were his life.”

“Yeah, and maybe he loved them a just little too much, eh?”

“What of it? Even if it was true. Maybe he made them happy.”

My attitude toward Serge was the same as with all the people I loved. I trusted them. I could even accept it when they did things I didn't understand. The only thing I couldn't tolerate was racism. I'd spent my childhood watching my father suffer from not being treated like a human being, but like a dog. A harbor dog. And he was only an Italian! I must admit, I don't have a whole lot of friends.

I had no desire to continue this conversation about Serge. In spite of everything, it made me uncomfortable. I wanted to forget that episode. Remember only the pain. Serge. Pavie. Arno. Another episode of my life, to be added to the already long column of losses.

Loubet was leafing through Serge's notebook. With him, there was a good chance that all these things that had been so meticulously written down wouldn't be forgotten at the back of a drawer. At least, the most important parts. Above all, there was a good chance Pertin wouldn't get away scot-free. He wasn't directly responsible for Serge's death. Or Pavie's. But he was the symbol of a police force I hated. A police force in which political ideas and personal ambitions were placed above the values of the Republic, like justice and equality. There were lots of guys like Pertin. Guys who'd stop at nothing. If the suburbs exploded one day, it would be down to them. Their contempt. Their xenophobia. Their hate. And all their shabby little schemes to become, one day, “a great cop.”

Pertin I knew. For me, he wasn't just an anonymous cop. He had a face. He was fat and red, with Ray-Bans hiding his piggy eyes and an arrogant smile. I wanted to bring him down. But I didn't have any illusions.

“There is one way I can safeguard this investigation,” Loubet said, thinking hard. “By linking it to the other one.”

“But there isn't any link.”

“I know. Unless we can pin Hocine Draoui's death on the FIS or the GIA. I make a beeline for this Abdelkader, and see what comes out. See if I can implicate Pertin.”

“A bit unlikely, isn't it?”

“Let me tell you something, Montale. You take what you can get. You can't force the truth out into the open. Not always. If I can get to the truth in one case, that's good enough for me.”

“But what about the others? The men who killed Draoui and Guitou?”

“Don't worry. I'll get them, trust me. However long it takes. Shall we have another dozen oysters and sea urchins?”

“Fine by me.”

“Did you sleep with her?”

If anyone else had asked me that question, I wouldn't have answered. Or if he'd asked me in other circumstances. But right now, it was a question of trust. Of friendship.

“No.”

“Do you regret it?”

“You bet!”

“What stopped you?”

Loubet was a great interrogator. He always knew exactly the question to ask to get a suspect to open up.

“Cûc is a man eater. Because the only man she ever loved, the first one and the only one, was Mathias' father, and she couldn't keep him. He died. And you know, Loubet, when you've lost something once, even if it's vanished entirely, you keep losing it over and over. I know. I've never been able to hold on to the women I've loved.”

“Have you eaten many women?” he asked, smiling.

“Too many, I suppose. I'm going to tell you a secret, and then we can get back to the matter at hand. I can't seem to grasp what it is I'm searching for, when it comes to women. And as long as I don't know what I need, all I do is hurt them. One after the other. Are you married?”

“Yes. With two children. Both boys.”

“Are you happy?”

“Yes, I think so. I don't often have time to ask myself the question. Or I don't take the time. Maybe because it's the kind of question you don't ask.”

I finished my glass and lit a cigarette. I looked at Loubet. He was a solid, dependable man. His job was no bed of roses, but he exuded confidence. A man who knew what he was doing. The opposite of me.

“Would you have slept with her?”

“No,” he said, laughing. “But I have to admit there is something irresistible about her.”

“Draoui couldn't resist Cûc. She needed him. The same way she needed Fabre. And when she needs a man, she knows how to get him.”

“Did she need you?”

“She wanted Draoui to help her save Fabre,” I said, without answering his question.

Because it hurt me to say yes. Yes, she'd tried to play with me, as she had with Hocine Draoui. Yes, she knew she could use me. In my head, I preferred to continue thinking that she'd desired me, without any ulterior motive. It didn't hurt my male pride so much. I wasn't a Latin for nothing!

“Do you think she loved her husband?” he asked, without reacting to the way I'd evaded his earlier question.

“You know, I really couldn't tell you if she loved him or not. She says she didn't. But she owes him everything she is today. He gave her a name. He helped her to raise Mathias. Thanks to him, she had a comfortable life. Not all Vietnamese refugees have been as lucky.”

“You said she wanted to save Fabre. Save him from what?”

“Wait. Cûc is also a woman with an urge to create, to build, to win, to succeed. Like a lot of people who've lost everything. Jews, Armenians,
pieds noirs
, they're all the same. They aren't immigrants. Do you know what I mean? An immigrant hasn't lost anything, because he didn't have anything in the place where he was living before. His only motivation is to survive, maybe just a little better than before.

“Cûc wanted to start a fashion business. Fabre got her the money. A lot of money. It gave her the means to establish her label in a very short time, not only in France but all over Europe. She had enough talent to convince the people putting up the money. Except that they would have put up the money for anything, or almost. The important thing was for the money to find a home. A safe home.”

“You mean it was dirty money?”

“Cûc's business is a limited company. The shareholders are Swiss, Panamanian and Costa Rican banks. She's the director but she doesn't own anything, not even her own brand name. She didn't realize what was going on at first. Until the day some big orders arrived, and her husband told her there was no point in meeting them. As long as she invoiced them. And let the money be paid into another company account rather than her current account. A Swiss account for which she can't even sign. You see what I'm saying?”

“If I've got this right, we're talking about the Mafia?”

“It's a word that scares people so much, no one in France even dares to mention it. What makes the world go round, Loubet? Money. And who has the most money? The Mafia. You know how much the worldwide drug traffic is worth? 1,650 billion francs a year. That's more than oil! Almost double.”

My journalist friend, Babette, had explained the whole thing to me one day. She knew a lot about the Mafia. She'd been in Italy for the last few months, working with a Roman journalist on a book about the Mafia in France. It was dynamite, she'd said.

According to her, within two years France would be in the same boat as Italy. Black money, the kind that, by definition, has no need to state where it comes from, had become the commodity most popular among politicians. Things had reached such a point, Babette had recently told me over the phone, that we had moved imperceptibly from a Mafia-style political society to a Mafia-style system.

“So Fabre had Mafia connections?”

“Who was Fabre? You've been looking into that, haven't you?”

“An architect, talented, left-wing sympathies, successful.”

“Extremely successful, you mean. Cûc told me his practice has been strongly tipped for the Euroméditerranée port development.”

Euroméditerranée was supposed to be the “new order” for Marseilles. A way for it to return to the international stage, through its port. I had my doubts. The Brussels technocrats who'd concocted the project were hardly likely to have the future of Marseilles at heart. They were only interested in regulating port activity. In changing the face of the Mediterranean between Genoa and Barcelona. But in Europe as a whole, the ports of the future were already Antwerp and Rotterdam.

We were being tricked, as always. The only future being mapped out for Marseilles was to be the leading port for fruit in the Mediterranean. And for international cruises. That's what the current project was basically looking toward. A huge construction site was rising in the eastern harbor basin, an area of half a square mile. A business park, an international communications center, a teleport, a tourism college . . . a godsend to the construction industry.

“Lots of money for Fabre! A whole different heap of shit than Serge and the fundamentalists.”

“Not really. It may be different, but the stink is the same. Let me tell you, in Serge's papers, I found some documents from the Federation of Algerian Intellectuals. You told me Draoui was a member. According to them, Algeria has gotten into the same Mafia-style political system. The war the Islamists are waging on the current government isn't a holy war. It's just a struggle for a share of the cake. That's why Boudiaf was murdered. Because he was the only one to come out and say it.”

“Here,” he said, refilling our glasses. “We need this.”

“It's the same in Russia right now. Not much hope there either. It'll be the death of us all.” I raised my glass. “Cheers.”

We remained silent for a moment, holding our glasses and thinking our thoughts. The second helping of seafood came as a relief.

“You're a strange guy, Montale. To me, you're like an hourglass. When the sand has gone down completely, there's always someone who comes and turns it over. Cûc must have had quite an effect on you!”

I smiled. I liked that image of the hourglass. Time draining away. In that interval of time you lived your life. Until nobody came to turn the hourglass over. Because you'd lost the taste for living.

“It wasn't Cûc who turned the hourglass over, as you put it. It was death. The closeness of death. The fact that it's all around us. I still believe in life.”

This conversation was taking me farther than I wanted to go. To places I usually feared to tread. As time went on, I found fewer and fewer reasons to carry on living. So I preferred to keep to the simple things. Like eating and drinking. Going fishing.

“To get back to Cûc,” I went on, “all she did was start the ball rolling. By urging Fabre to break with his Mafia friends. She'd started looking into his business affairs. The contracts. The people he met. What she found made her panic. She felt threatened. All the things she'd built up were at risk. The goals she'd set herself, one night, in a shabby two-room apartment in Le Havre. Her life itself, and her life was Mathias. The fruit of her lost love. A love destroyed by violence, hatred, war.

“She begged Fabre to stop. She wanted the three of them to go to Vietnam and start a new life. But Fabre was tied hand and foot. The classic bind. Like those politicians who take kickbacks to climb the ladder and think that once they get to the top, they'll have so much money they'll be able to make a clean sweep. Break with their old habits, their dubious connections. But they can't. It's impossible. Once you accept that first envelope, you're done for. Or even a tie as a gift.

“Fabre couldn't draw a line under all that. So long, guys, thanks for everything. He didn't want to go under. To end up in prison, the way others have lately. It made him bad-tempered. He started drinking. He became impossible to live with. He'd come home later and later at night. Sometimes he wouldn't come home at all. That was the only reason Cûc seduced Hocine Draoui. To humiliate her husband. To tell him she didn't love him. That she was going to leave him. It was a desperate kind of blackmail. A cry for love. Because deep down, I think she loved him.

“But Fabre didn't understand that. Or didn't want to. Anyway, he couldn't bear it. Cûc was his whole life. He loved her more than anything, I think. Maybe she was the reason he'd done what he had. I don't know. We'll never know. What's certain is that he felt betrayed by her. And by Hocine Draoui . . . Especially as Draoui's work threatened the plans for the parking garage in the Vieille-Charité . . . It's Fabre's practice that has the job. I read that on the billboard outside the construction site.”