Chourmo (6 page)

Everything I did showed him that his approach was a mistake. But I made mistakes too, more than my share, by trying too hard to play for time, to be conciliatory. Trying too hard to understand what couldn't be understood. Poverty and despair. I guess I didn't act enough like a cop. That was what my bosses told me. Later. I think they were right. From the police point of view, I mean.

Since my resignation, Pertin had re-established his power over the projects. His “law” prevailed. The beating sessions in the disused quarries had resumed. The high-speed chases through the streets too. Hate. The escalation of hate. Fantasies were becoming reality and any citizen, armed with a rifle, could shoot on sight at anything that wasn't completely white. Ibrahim Ali, a seventeen-year-old Comorian, had died like that, one night in February 1995, running after a night bus with his friends.

“I asked you a question. What are you doing here?”

“Sightseeing. I missed the neighborhood. The people, that kind of thing.”

Of the four of them, only Babar smiled. Pertin bent over Serge's body. “Shit! It's your friend, the faggot! He's dead.”

“I saw.”

He looked at me, a wicked gleam in his eye. “What was he doing here?”

“No idea.”

“And you?”

“I told you, Pertin. I was passing. I wanted to see the kids play, so I stopped.”

The basketball court was empty.

“What kids? No one's playing.”

“The game ended when the shooting started. You know how they are. It's not that they don't like you. But they'd rather not meet you.”

“Save the comments, Montale. I don't give a shit. What's your story?”

I told him.

 

I told him a second time. At the station house. Pertin hadn't been able to resist the pleasure. The pleasure of having me sitting there opposite him, being interrogated. In this station house, where, for years, I'd ruled the roost. It was a meager revenge, but he was as happy about it as only a loser could be, and he wanted to savor it as much as he could. The opportunity might not come again.

And behind those fucking Ray-Bans, the wheels were turning in Pertin's brain. Serge and I had been buddies. Maybe we still were. Serge had just been whacked. Which meant he must have done something he shouldn't. I was there, on the scene. A witness. Yes, but why not an accomplice? That made me a lead. Not to collar the guys who'd gunned down Serge, but to collar me. I could just imagine the kick he'd get out of that.

I couldn't see his eyes, but I was sure that was what I'd have read in them if I could. Just because you're stupid doesn't mean you can't think logically.

“Profession?” he'd asked, contemptuously.

“Unemployed.”

He burst out laughing. Carli stopped typing and laughed as well.

“No! So you're on welfare, are you? Like the niggers and the Arabs?”

I turned to Carli. “Are you getting this down?”

“Only the answers.”

“Mustn't offend Superman here!” Pertin said. He leaned toward me. “And what do you live on?”

“Where do you think you are, Pertin? On TV? Or at the circus?”

I'd raised my voice a little. To set the record straight. To remind them I was just a witness. I didn't know anything about this business. I had nothing to hide, except the reason I'd gone to the project. I could tell my story a hundred times, it wouldn't change. Pertin had figured that immediately, and it made him really mad. He'd have liked to hit me. He'd have done it if he could. He'd stop at nothing. In the days when he was under my authority, he'd always make sure the dealers were tipped off when I was getting ready to make a raid. Or he'd tip off the narcs, if he felt the haul would be a good one. I still remembered the failure of a bust in Le Petit Séminaire, another project in North Marseilles. The dealers were a family. Brothers, sisters, relatives: they were all in on it. They operated where they lived, like good neighbors. And the kids paid them in stolen hi-fi equipment, which they then resold immediately, at three times the price. The profits were reinvested in drugs. The raid was a damp squib. The narcs succeeded three years later, with Pertin in charge.

He smiled. It wasn't a genuine smile. I was scoring points, and he knew it. To show me he was still in control, he picked up Serge's passport from the table in front of him and waved it under my nose.

“Tell me, Montale, you know where your buddy was crashing?”

“No idea.”

“Are you sure?”

“Should I know?”

He opened the passport, and smiled again. “At Arno's place.”

Shit! What was that all about? Pertin was watching for my reactions. I didn't have any. I waited. He hated me so much, he was making mistakes. He should never have revealed information to a witness.

“It isn't written in here,” he said, waving the passport like a fan. “But we have our sources. In fact, we've been quite well informed, since you left. Seeing as how we're cops, not priests. You see the difference?”

“I see,” I replied.

He leaned toward me. “He was one of your blue-eyed boys, wasn't he, that little Gypsy bastard?”

Arno. Arno Gimenez. I'd never been sure whether or not we'd made a mistake with him. Eighteen years old, crazy, cunning, stubborn sometimes to the point of stupidity. With a passion for motorbikes. The only guy capable of lifting a bike on the street with a chick still on it and carting her off, without her crying rape or theft. A mechanical genius. Every time he got involved in selling stolen goods, Serge would show up, then me.

One day, we'd cornered him in a bar called the Balto, in L'Estaque.

“Why don't you get a job?” Serge had said.

“Oh, yeah, great. I could buy a TV, a VCR, save for a pension, watch the Kawasakis passing on the street. Like cows watching the trains go by. That's it, huh? Yeah, great, guys. Real cool . . . ”

He was making fun of us. Of course we weren't great at arguing for the benefits of society. Talking about morality, on the other hand, now that was something that came easily to us. Beyond that, it was a dead end.

“Guys want bikes,” Arno had continued. “I find them bikes. I fix the bikes up for them and they're happy. It's cheaper than getting them from a dealership, and there's no sales tax to pay, so . . . ”

I'd put my nose in my glass of beer, thinking how pointless conversations like this were. Serge tried to come out with a few more fine phrases, but Arno cut him off.

“For clothes, there's Carrefour. A big choice. Same with food. You just have to order.” He looked at us, craftily. “Want to come with me one day?”

I often thought of Serge's credo: “Where there is revolt, there is anger. And where there is anger, there is life.” It was beautiful. And maybe we'd trusted Arno too much. Or not enough. Maybe it really wasn't enough, because he didn't come to us the night he decided to hold up a drugstore on Boulevard de la Libération, at the top of the Canebière. All alone, like an idiot. And not with a crappy plastic gun. No, a real gun, big and black, shooting real bullets that could kill. All because Mira, his big sister, had the bailiffs on her back and needed five thousand in cash, otherwise she'd be out on the street with her two kids.

Arno had been given five years. Mira had been thrown out of where she lived. She'd taken the kids and left for Perpignan, where her folks were. The social worker hadn't been able to do anything for her, nor had the neighborhood committee. Serge and I were equally unsuccessful on behalf of Arno. Our testimonies were dismissed, like shit being flushed down the toilet. Society needs examples, sometimes, to show its citizens that it has the situation well in hand. And no more dreams for the Gimenez kids.

It put years on Serge and me. In his first letter, Arno had written: “I'm bored to death. I can't talk to the guys here. There's one who does nothing but talk about his exploits. The bozo thinks he's Mesrine. The other's an Arab, who's only interested in scrounging your smokes, your sugar, your coffee . . . The nights are long. But I can't get to sleep, even though I'm exhausted. I'm too worked up. I can't stop thinking . . . ”

Pertin hadn't taken his eyes off me, pleased that he'd made an impression.

“How do you explain that, huh? That he was crashing at that son of a bitch's place?”

I slowly lifted my ass off the chair, and moved my face closer to his. I grabbed his Ray-bans and slid them down his nose. He had little eyes. Dirty yellow eyes, like a hyena's. It gave me the creeps looking into those eyes. He didn't blink. We stayed like that for a suspended moment. With my finger, I thrust the Ray-Bans back onto the bridge of his nose.

“I think we're done here. I've got other things to do. Forget about me.”

Carli's fingers hung in midair above the keyboard. He was looking at me, open-mouthed.

“When you've finished the report,” I said, “sign it for me and wipe your ass with it. OK?” I turned back to Pertin. “Bye, Four Eyes.”

I went out. Nobody stopped me.

N
ight had fallen by the time I got back to La Bigotte. Back to square one. Outside D4. On the roadway, the chalk outline of Serge's body was already fading. Inside the buildings, they must have talked about the guy who'd been shot until the eight o'clock news. Then life had regained the upper hand. Tomorrow, it would again be gray in the North and sunny in the South. And even if you were unemployed, you thought that was great.

I looked up at the buildings, wondering which of the apartments Serge had been coming out of, who he'd been to see, and why. And what on earth he could have been doing to be killed like a dog.

My eyes came to rest on the windows of the Hamoudi family. On the tenth floor. Where their daughter Naïma lived. The girl Guitou loved. But I didn't think the two kids were here. They weren't in these blocks. They weren't in one of the bedrooms, listening to music. They weren't in the living room, calmly watching TV. These projects weren't a place for love. Any kid who'd been born here, grown up here, knew that. You didn't live in a place like this, you died slowly. Love needs dreams, and a future. The sea, instead of warming their hearts, as it had their parents', was an incentive to get away.

I knew that. Manu and Ugo and I, as soon as we could, would leave the Panier and go to watch the freighters sail away. Wherever they were going, it was better than living in poverty in the damp alleys of the neighborhood. We were fifteen years old, and that was what we thought. The same thing my father had thought sixty years earlier, in the port of Naples. Or my mother. And so, I supposed, had thousands of Spaniards and Portuguese. Armenians, Vietnamese, Africans. Algerians, Comorians.

That's what I was thinking as I crossed the parking lot. I was also thinking that there was no way the Hamoudi family had taken in a young French boy. Any more than Gélou could have received a young Arab girl in her house. It was the weight of tradition. Sad as it might be, racism cut both ways. Today more than ever.

But here I was. With no illusions, but always ready to believe in miracles. I'd find Guitou, take him back to his mother and a bastard whose only language was his fists. If I found him, I'd decided I'd be gentle. I didn't want to make things worse. Not for these two kids. I believed in first love. In “The first girl you took in your arms,” to quote the Brassens song.

All afternoon, I'd been thinking about Magali. That hadn't happened in years. Since that first night in the blockhouse, time had passed and we'd met again and made love. But that night was one I'd never taken out of my box of souvenirs. I was pretty much of the opinion that, however old you are when it happens—fifteen, sixteen, seventeen or even eighteen—the first time you sleep with someone, and break once and for all with your mother, or your father, is the decisive moment. It isn't a question of sex. It's the way you look at other people, women, men, after that. The way you look at life. And the feeling—right or wrong, good or bad—that you have for the rest of your life, about love.

I'd loved Magali. I should have married her. I was sure my life would have been different. Hers too. But there were too many people hoping that what she and I wanted so much would come true. My parents, hers, our uncles and aunts . . . We didn't want these old people, who knew it all, who laid down the rules, to be right. So Magali and I had played at hurting each other. Her letter reached me in Djibouti, where I was doing my military service, in the Colonial Army. “I'm three months pregnant. The father wants to marry me. In June. Kisses.” Magali was the first screw-up in my life. She wasn't the last.

I didn't know if Guitou and Naïma were in love the way we'd been in love. But I didn't want things to go bad for them. I wanted them to have the chance to spend a weekend, a month, a year together. Or forever. Without the adults sucking the air out of them. Without them being messed around too much. I could do that for them. I owed it to Magali, who, for twenty years, had been champing at the bit with a guy she'd never really loved, as she'd told me much later in a letter.

I took a deep breath, and climbed the stairs to the Hamoudis' apartment. Because, of course, the elevator was “temporarily out of order.”

 

Behind the door, I could hear loud rap music. I recognized the voice of MC Solaar.
Prose Combat.
One of his hits. Since he'd taken part in a rap writing workshop with the kids in the projects, on 1 May one year, between two concerts, he'd been their idol. A woman shouted, and the sound dimmed. I took advantage of that to ring a second time. “There's someone at the door,” the woman cried. Mourad opened.

Mourad was one of the boys I'd watched earlier on the basketball court. I'd noticed him. He had a good sense of teamwork.