Chourmo (5 page)

She put up with it. Because when she's fifty, she said, even an attractive woman doesn't have many choices. The most important thing is having a man. At least as important as financial security. And that was worth the occasional unhappiness, the occasional humiliation. The occasional sacrifice too. She was quite prepared to admit that she'd lost Guitou somewhere along the way. For the best of reasons. Fear. Fear of arguing with Alex. Fear of being dumped. Fear of being alone. The day would come when Guitou would leave home. As Patrice had done, then Marc.

Guitou, admittedly, hadn't been planned, by Gino and her. He'd come along years later. Six years. An accident. The two others were already big. She hadn't wanted to be a mother anymore, she wanted to be a woman. Then Gino had died, and she was left with this child. And her terrible grief. She became a mother again.

Alex had taken care of the kids. They got along fine. There were no problems. But as he grew, Guitou started to hate this father who wasn't his father. His real father, the one he hadn't had time to get to know, became a paragon of virtue. Guitou started to like everything that Alex hated and hate everything Alex liked. After his two brothers left home, the bad feeling between Guitou and Alex had gotten worse. Everything became an excuse for a confrontation. Even the choice of which movie to watch on TV would end in an argument, and Guitou would shut himself in his room and play music, loud. First rock, then reggae. Raï and rap in the past year.

Alex started hitting Guitou. Nothing bad, a couple of slaps. Gino would have done the same. Kids deserve it sometimes. Guitou more than most. He'd gotten a slap when the girl, the Arab girl, had showed up at the house, but then things had degenerated. Guitou had protested, and Alex had been forced to hit him. Hard. She'd come between them, but Alex had told her not to interfere. The kid did just what he liked, he said. They'd taken too much from him already. Listening to Arab music in the house was one thing. But inviting one of them home was a step too far. It was the same old story. First it would be her, then her brothers, and then all the tribe. Deep down, Gélou pretty much agreed with Alex.

Now she was panicking. Because she didn't know what to do anymore. She didn't want to lose Alex, but Guitou running away, and then not getting in touch with her, made her feel guilty. He was her son. She was his mother.

“I've fried a few
panisses
,” Honorine said to Gélou. “Look, they're still warm.” She handed me the plate, and the focaccia she was holding under her arm.

During the summer, I'd built a little passageway between her terrace and mine. With a little wooden door. That avoided her having to come out of her house to get to mine. I didn't have anything to hide from Honorine. Not my dirty linen, not my love affairs. I was like the son her Toinou hadn't been able to give her.

I smiled, and brought water and a bottle of
pastis
, and got ready to charcoal-grill the bream. When you're in trouble, you might as well take your time.

T
he kids were playing really well. They weren't showing off. They were playing for the pleasure of the game. They wanted to learn, they wanted their team to be the best one day. The basketball court, which was fairly recent, had taken part of the space away from the parking lot in front of the two big blocks of the La Bigotte housing project, on the heights of Notre-Dame Limite, on the “border” between Marseilles and Septèmes-les-Vallons. A housing project that towered over North Marseilles.

It was no worse—and no better—here than anywhere else. A mass of concrete in the middle of a twisted landscape of rock and chalk. The city down below, on the left. A long way away. You're a long way from everything here. Except poverty. Even the washing drying in the windows bears witness to that. It always looks colorless, in spite of the sun and the wind. Poor people's washing. But one thing the people “down there” don't have is the view. A stunning view, the most beautiful view in Marseilles. You open the window and you have the sea all to yourself, for free. When you have nothing, owning the sea—the Mediterranean—means a lot. Like a crust of bread when you're starving.

The idea of the basketball court was down to one of the kids, who was called OubaOuba. Not because he was a wild man from the jungles of Senegal, but because he could jump higher to reach the basket than a kangaroo. He was a true artist.

“When I see all these cars taking up so much space, it bugs me,” he'd said to Lucien, a friendly guy from the Social Committee. “The place where I live may not be very big, fair enough. But these parking lots, dammit!”

The idea had spread. A race had started between the mayor and the deputy, much to the amusement of the departmental councilor who, unlike them, wasn't running for re-election. I remembered it well. The kids didn't even wait for the end of the official speeches to take over “their” court. It wasn't even finished. It never was, in fact, and now there were cracks all over the thin layer of asphalt.

I smoked a cigarette and watched them playing. It felt strange being back here, in North Marseilles. This had been my patch. Since I'd resigned, I hadn't set foot here again. I had no reason to come here. Here, or La Bricarde, or La Solidarité, or La Savine, or La Paternelle . . . There's nothing in these projects. Nothing to see. Nothing to do. Not even anywhere to buy a Coke. At least in Le Plan d'Aou, one grocery store survived as best it could.

You had to live here, or be a cop, or a youth worker, to go anywhere near neighborhoods like this. For most people in Marseilles, the north of the city is nothing but an abstraction. They know the place exists, but they've never been there, and will never go there. Their vision of it comes exclusively from TV. Like the Bronx, I guess. They fantasize about it. And they fear it.

Of course, I'd let myself be persuaded by Gélou to look for Guitou. We'd avoided talking about it during the meal. We were both embarrassed. She because of what she'd told me, and me because of what I'd heard. Fortunately, Honorine had kept the conversation going.

“I don't know how you manage up there in those mountains of yours. I've only ever left Marseilles once, to go to Avignon. One of my sisters, Louise, needed me. I was so unhappy . . . But I only stayed two months. What I missed most was the sea. Here, I can spend hours looking at it. It's never the same. They have the Rhône over there, of course. But it's not the same thing at all. It never changes. It's always gray and doesn't smell of anything.”

“You don't always get to choose in life,” Gélou had replied, wearily.

“It's true, the sea isn't everything. Happiness, your kids, your health, come first.”

Gélou was on the verge of tears. She'd lit a cigarette. She'd barely touched her bream.

“Please do it, please go,” she'd murmured when Honorine had gone out to fetch the coffee cups.

Now here I was. Outside the block where the Hamoudi family lived. And Gélou was waiting for me. She was waiting for Guitou and me. Anxiously, even with Honorine there to reassure her.

“She's in trouble, isn't she?” Honorine had asked me in the kitchen.

“It's her youngest son. Guitou. He's run away. She thinks he's here, in Marseilles. Don't needle her too much while I'm gone.”

“You're going to find him?”

“Someone has to go, right?”

“Yes, but why not . . . ? I don't know . . . Does she live alone?”

“We'll talk about it later, all right?”

“Ah, so it's like I said, your cousin's in trouble. Not just with her youngest.”

I lit another cigarette. OubaOuba scored a basket that left his friends speechless. They were a damn good team, these kids. But as for me, I was still hesitating. I lacked the courage, or rather, the conviction. How would it look, showing up at these people's door? “Hello, my name's Fabio Montale. I've come to get the boy. This affair's gone on long enough. You cool it, your mother's worried enough as it is.” No, I couldn't do that. What I was going to do was take the two kids to my place, and let them explain it all to Gélou.

I spotted a familiar figure. Serge. I recognized him from the clumsy, almost childish way he walked. He was coming out of section D4, right in front of me. He seemed to have gotten thinner. Half his face was covered by a thick beard. He crossed to the parking lot, his hands in the pockets of his denim jacket, his shoulders bent. He seemed quite sad.

I hadn't seen him for two years. I didn't even know he was still in Marseilles. He'd been a youth worker in North Marseilles for several years, and he'd been dismissed, partly because of me. Whenever I collared kids who'd committed some offense or other, he was the one I called to the station house, even before the parents. He'd give me information about the families, and advice. The kids were his life. That was why he'd chosen that line of work. Because he'd had enough of seeing teenagers end up in the can. He trusted them, that was the main thing. He had the kind of faith in people that some priests have. In fact, he was a bit too much like a priest, for my taste. We'd gotten on well, without ever becoming friends. Because of that side of him that was like a priest. I've never believed men are good. Just that they deserved to be treated equally.

My links with Serge set tongues wagging. And my bosses didn't like it at all. A cop and a youth worker! We were made to pay for it. Serge was the first to go. He was dealt with harshly. When my turn came, it was a little more subtle. After all, it wasn't so easy to get rid of a cop whose appointment to the neighborhood had deliberately been made into a media event a few years earlier. Gradually, my workforce was reduced, and more and more responsibilities were taken away from me. Although I didn't believe in it anymore, I'd carried on, because being a cop was the only thing I knew how to do. It had taken the deaths of too many people I loved before disgust finally prevailed and set me free.

What the hell was Serge doing here? I didn't have time to ask him. A black BMW with tinted windows suddenly appeared as if from nowhere. It was moving very slowly, and Serge didn't take any notice of it. When it came level with him, an arm emerged through the rear window. A hand carrying a revolver. Three shots, at point blank range. The BMW took off, disappearing as suddenly as it had come.

Serge was lying on the asphalt. Dead. There was no doubt about it.

 

The shots echoed between the blocks. Windows opened. The boys stopped playing, and the ball rolled across the roadway. Time froze, and for a moment there was silence. Then people came hurrying from all sides.

I ran to Serge.

“Move aside,” I cried to the people who were gathering around the body. As if Serge might still need space and air.

I crouched beside him. A movement that had become familiar to me. Too familiar. As familiar as death. The years had gone by, and that seemed to be all I ever did: crouch to look at a corpse. Shit! It couldn't be starting all over again, could it? Why were there so many corpses in my life? And why were more and more of them people I knew or loved? Manu and Ugo, my friends from childhood and hard times. Leila, so beautiful, and so young I hadn't dared live with her. And now my pal Serge.

Death wouldn't let go of me. It was like a kind of glue I'd trodden in without realizing it. But why? Why, dammit?

Serge had taken the shots full in the stomach. High caliber. .38, I suspected. Professional weapons. What kind of mess had the idiot gotten himself mixed up in? I looked up at D4. Who had he been to see? And why? It was unlikely that whoever it was he'd just visited was going to put his head out of the window and show himself.

“Have you seen him before?” I asked OubaOuba, who'd come up beside me.

“Never seen the guy.”

The police siren could be heard at the entrance to the project. They were quick, for a change! The kids vanished in less than two minutes. Only the women, the children and a few ageless old people were left. And me.

They arrived like cowboys. From the way they screeched to a halt alongside the group of onlookers, I guessed they'd been spending a lot of time watching
Starsky and Hutch
on TV. They must even have rehearsed that arrival, because it was so damn accurate. The four doors opened at the same time and they all ejected. Except Babar. He was the oldest cop in the neighborhood station house, and it was a long time since he'd enjoyed playing remakes of old cop shows. He wanted to reach retirement the way he'd started his career, without too much effort. And preferably alive.

Pertin, known as Four Eyes by all the kids in the project, because of the Ray-Bans he never took off, glanced at Serge's corpse, then stood looking me up and down.

“What are you doing here?”

Pertin and I weren't exactly best buddies. Although he was a chief inspector, for seven years I'd been the person in charge of North Marseilles. His neighborhood station house had been no more than an outpost of the Neighborhood Surveillance Squad, which I led. He was at our disposal.

From the beginning, it was war between Pertin and me. “In the Arab neighborhoods,” he'd say, “there's only one thing that works, and that's force.” That was his credo, and for years he'd applied it to the letter. “The thing with the Arabs, all you gotta do is grab one from time to time, take him out to a deserted quarry, and beat the crap out of him. They've always done some stupid thing that you don't know about. You hit the scum, they always know why. That's a damn sight better than a lot of ID checks. It avoids paperwork at the station house. And it does wonders for your nerves after the Arabs have been fucking you around.”

According to Pertin, they were just “doing their job honestly.” That's what he'd told the journalists the day after his team had “accidentally” shot down a seventeen-year-old Arab during a routine ID check. That was in 1988. Marseilles was up in arms about the blunder. That year, they thrust me into the position of head of the Neighborhood Surveillance Squad. I was the supercop who was going to restore order and calm to North Marseilles. I had to, because we were on the verge of a riot.