Marseille Noir
Page 5
I walked around the block, then around another. To tell the truth, I was sort of dazed myself, and I walked without thinking much about anything. I went by the Vieille-Charité and the Hôtel-Dieu. When it’s not all narrow streets, the neighborhood is full of beautiful seventeenth-century buildings . . . I meandered through the streets to wherever the night led me. I walked by the famous Chez Étienne pizzeria, founded by a Sicilian immigrant. Closed at that hour, of course. Too bad, I really would have liked to get rid of my anxiety by biting into a pizza covered with anchovies, tomato sauce, garlic, and olives. Then I walked up to the place des Moulins. The streets were quiet. I avoided clacking my boots. I sat down on a bench. Thought things over. I had just killed somebody. The asshole surely had parents, a girlfriend, but no children, no, too young and obviously the type who doesn’t give a shit; that, at least, was good. I wanted to light up, but I don’t smoke. I looked at the windows on the square. All dark. It was close to four. I still had the book in my hand. I took a look at the author’s mug on the jacket. A lawyer who writes novels, you don’t see that every day, most of them just blab. I memorized his name just in case, then I moved down the narrow streets, crossed the passage through the Pouillon buildings to the waterfront, on the Vieux-Port. There I threw the book into the water. It swelled and sank fast. Exit the murder weapon. Exit a piece of myself too.
Then I walked back home.
I fell asleep in the peaceful silence, telling myself it sure had been a strange night.
* * *
To be honest, I’m not sure I slept all that well. When I woke up I saw myself again at that asshole’s place, closing out his case with the lawyer’s big thriller. I felt feverish and made myself coffee. Heart racing two hundred miles an hour. On the other hand, I was kind of pleased. A little like Dexter on TV: the feeling of a job that had to be done, and from then on you have to face the consequences, avoid making a stir, be discreet. Anyway, what could I have done? Complaining to the police again about my neighbor disturbing the peace would have been useless, I might as well piss into the wind—I had finally realized it simply wasn’t their problem.
But when a neighbor of the asshole discovered the body—like an idiot, I’d left the door open—I’m the one they came to see first. Routine questions and all that, but with pretty mean insinuations, like they were well aware that I didn’t like the neighbor’s noise and, “Sir, we’ve seen other cases like this, respectable accountants, nice little teachers too, who went postal for the most trivial reasons,” and maybe I’d decided to act on my own . . .
“Accidents can happen so fast, Monsieur LaMarca,” the inspector said as he checked my name on a card.
I shrugged, with a cup of coffee in hand. I answered nervously that I was in a hurry, work can’t wait. “The music stopped around two and I went back to sleep. End of story. I’m certainly sorry for that gentleman, but honestly, I can’t say I’m going to miss him.”
“What do you do for a living?”
“I teach history and geography. In fact, I’m supposed to be at school in less than an hour.”
“What high school?”
“Pierre Puget.”
“Oh, I see.”
He saw what? I wondered. He was acting official, that’s all. But he let me go, to continue his investigation with the neighbor upstairs—Djibril—a Comorian who’d just created a start-up. Djibril didn’t give a damn about the neighbor’s music, he spent his nights with headphones over his ears, immersed in his own music and his wooly theories about making it big through computer science. He was developing tourist apps for Marseille and the Comoros; he’d just launched a guide to the Panier district for cell phones, with QR codes and the whole digitized shebang, and in fact he wasn’t doing so badly. He wouldn’t have much to tell the police; I could rest easy as far as he was concerned.
It was Friday, 10:35. I took off for school on my scooter at top speed, half to make time, half out of pure nervousness.
3
Three days later, the cops called to summon me to the Évêché, the police headquarters of Marseille, which is right behind where I live, at the border of Le Panier and La Joliette. I walked there around six thirty. It was nice out for that time of year, but I didn’t really have the heart to appreciate the weather. I wasn’t exactly anxious, but still, not 100 percent calm either. Who would be, in my shoes? The same inspector—from the CID, I learned that as I read his name, Kevin Gandolfini, on a prominently displayed plaque—received me in a room crammed with cabinets overflowing with papers. But his desk was all shipshape, a computer, a notebook, a pen, and a pair of Ray-Ban Wayfarer sunglasses. That made me smile: I had the same glasses at his age; it just goes to show how generations often replicate themselves.
“Monsieur LaMarca . . . sit down, sit down.”
He pointed to two wooden chairs which must have come from the Emmaüs charity stores and deserved to go back there.
“I asked you to come because there are new elements in the investigation and I have a few questions for you.”
Yeah, right . . . He looked me in the eye as he said this and I must admit I was worried stiff, even though I didn’t flinch. The guy was playing cat-and-mouse with me and wanted to claw me a little before he swallowed me up.
Gandolfini still hadn’t taken his eyes off me. “You didn’t tell me everything Friday morning, Monsieur LaMarca.”
“What was I supposed to tell you?”
“Tsk, tsk. Well, for instance, you’re sure you went back to sleep when the music stopped?”
If you don’t know what cold sweat is, I advise you to live through this kind of moment. No doubt Gandolfini was going to play with me a little and then reach the obvious conclusion: if I wasn’t home, it’s because I was tearing my poor neighbor to shreds across the street. I had learned his name in the meantime. At least I could now put a name to my crime: Antoine Julien.
Despite the fear gnawing at my insides, I told the cop he was right, it’s true that I was on edge that night and I decided to calm myself down by taking a walk. I told him about the quiet of the narrow streets free of cars at night, the sweetness of the sea breeze. You could even say I put on a lyrical, romantic show, and I ended by explaining that if I hadn’t said anything about it Friday morning, it’s because I was afraid he’d misinterpret my wanderings.
There was a long lull in the conversation. My eyes were riveted on the tips of my shoes, his were still fixed on my humble person.
“See,” he said, “you can do okay when you want to . . . You did well not to continue your lie of omission, Monsieur LaMarca. It would have made you extremely suspicious, because guess what? You were seen at 2:35 a.m., walking down the Montée des Accoules . . .”
I smiled inwardly at the paradox of “walking down the Montée”—the “ascension” des Accoules—and at the fact that at two thirty that night, I was beating up my neighbor in his apartment and certainly not walking down the Montée des Accoules . . .
“Monsieur Romuald Lopez, a homeless man who was lying there, recognized you. He knows everybody in the neighborhood and he’s absolutely positive. So, I wondered what you were doing outside even though you stated that you never left your apartment. You get my drift?”
“Mmm,” I said, close to fainting.
“Now, it so happens that at 2:25 a.m., Monsieur LaMarca, your unfortunate neighbor Antoine Julien was facing his murderer because that’s exactly when he sent a distressed text message to a certain Diego, a heavy he was doing business with, saying, and I’m reading: fuk crazy guy here y . . . 2:25 a.m. on one side, 2:35 on the other, for the moment I’ve got to think you probably weren’t at your neighbor’s place at the time of the crime, even though it’s only a matter of a few minutes. So unless things change I’m not holding you. But you have to remain at the disposal of the police, and of course do not leave Marseille.”
I shut up and blessed the lenient nature of Inspector Gandolfini. But what followed would turn out to be something even more pleasant.
I found him under his real identity, Jean-Louis Younger, in an article from a few months back that mentioned drug dealing. He seemed to be the local kingpin. A promising suspect for the police, surely more interesting than an innocuous little teacher like me. But I couldn’t leave everything to chance, better to give it a little help. Younger had gotten six months with probation, so he was around somewhere. It was up to me to show he was the guilty party. A call to my friend Blanco, Chief Inspector Blanco, was imperative. The conversation with Gandolfini had given me a good kick in the butt, a shot of adrenaline. I forgot my qualms, my feelings of guilt. Now I had to get out of the mess I was in, avoid being identified as the real perpetrator. So I called my friend Blanco. We’d gone to college together, but not for long. He’d stopped after he got his degree in history and took the exam to become a police inspector. And passed it. We’d kept in touch, not very regularly but always in a friendly way. Blanco was appointed to Marseille. I called him to meet over a pizza the next day.
* * *
On a little square just above city hall, a discreet family restaurant beckoned. The waitress took us up to the second floor. Blanco looked in good shape, his ironic smile still fixed at the corners of his thin lips. He didn’t really appreciate my trying to get information about an ongoing investigation out of him, but I was sure a good pizza and a few glasses of wine would activate his vocal cords. Blanco was a chatterbox who didn’t know he was one.
According to Blanco, Jean-Louis Younger sent one of his emissaries over to poor Antoine Julien to collect a debt of tens of thousands of euros and it went wrong, so wrong Julien died. Younger could get sent down for accessory to murder, illegal drug trafficking, and criminal conspiracy—and this time, no probation. The cops would be delighted to collar him, without being too fussy about the exact timetable of other possible perpetrators. From Blanco’s smirk when he said that, I clearly understood he’d be ready to hang the murder on Younger’s man without batting an eyelash. The emissary in question answered to the name of Crazy Toto, which in local talk marked him as a troublemaker, a guy with a bad temper. Only problem, this Toto was nowhere to be found at the moment: there were reports of him in Paris, in Cadaquès, Spain, and some even said he left for Turkey to bring back a shipload.
Blanco winked at me with his famous smile, and explained that he knew exactly where to find Toto: in a furnished room on rue Paradis. He suggested I reserve a table at the restaurant of the new MuCEM (Musée des Civilisations Européennes et Méditerranéennes) that had a sea view and a three-star chef, for he was definitely going to get me out of the fix I was in.
I didn’t try to understand how Blanco knew so much about this case. I knew he had some weight in the local police but between the official hierarchy and deals with the unions, I could never tell with any certainty what kind of real power my friend actually had. I didn’t even ask him about Gandolfini. Like a good chatterbox, he’s the one who spilled the beans, and this time without the smile: “Gandolfini’s going to have to back off, he’s not on this case anymore, he’s out, ba-da-bing! He’s mixed up with some murky debts at the Casino Barriere de Cassis and the Inspection Générale de la Police Nationale—the police of the police—are all over him. He’s now persona non grata at the Évêché. They asked me to take over some of his current cases. So it’s simple: tonight we didn’t see each other and I’ll call you for that invitation when your case is cleared up. Don’t worry, as soon as I get my hands on Toto, it’ll be a done deal. We’ve been trying to get Younger for a long time and now both of them will spend a little time behind bars . . . And don’t bother to try to find out how we’ll do it, we’ve got the text message and he’ll tell us the rest.”
A new wink, back to the smile, two glasses clink. It’s like the case was already closed.
4
A few months later, everything was okay. Crazy Toto was convicted and just like Blanco had predicted, the police were able to get to Younger, a.k.a. Diego, and send him down for accessory to murder. Nobody bothered me anymore, and though I wasn’t very proud of what I’d done, I was glad I could continue living in total freedom. The neighborhood was quiet again and the death of poor Antoine Julien was forgotten. His apartment had finally found a new buyer. A Swede had moved in, attracted by the new trendy aspect of Marseille, which was making the whole city and Le Panier in particular one of those spots on the planet that attracts rich Anglo-Saxons and Germano-Scandinavians longing for authenticity. On place de Lenche and rue des Pistoles, English and French were replacing Arab and Berber in daily exchanges, Corsican and Italian having long been assimilated into the local yet very international French. Okay, I’m exaggerating a little but not much: my taste for geography might make me overestimate the number of different nationalities who go by under my windows, and I keep dreaming of a world where coming from somewhere else wouldn’t be a stigma but a subject for joyful curiosity.
But do I have the right to dream? I’m a murderer . . .
I began to read Confucius—I’m trying to learn how to be really Zen. Luckily, it’s a very thin book with a hard cover, the better to resist the treatment I inflict on it daily. “Silence is a friend that never betrays you,” said the Chinese sage. So I keep silent.
The Swede I mentioned, my new neighbor, had moved to Marseille to train the new ice hockey team and had a hobby that seemed likeable at first: he loved the tango. So much so he played tangoes on his violin from morning to night on the days he wasn’t on the ice. Everything went fine for a few months. But when his team started losing, he began to play out of tune. Terribly out of tune. And very, very late.
So last night, with my nerves completely on edge, at two thirty in the morning, despite my close acquaintance with Confucius, I went over to explain that he’d better stop his music. I put my book in my pocket and felt the cover. It seemed good and solid. I’m sure you understand.
Silence is a friend that never betrays you.
THE DEAD PAY A PRICE fOR THE LIVING
by RENÉ FRÉGNI
Château-Gombert
Murder is not what I want to talk about. I want to speak of joy, suffering, and love. —Knut Hamsun
When I look at dogs, I miss wolves. —Victor Hugo
I didn’t come back to the suburb where I grew up to pick olives. I came back to kill a man.
I’m going to crush that man like a rat. He is a rat. He was my childhood friend.
During the eight years I’ve just spent behind bars, he took everything from me. All my savings and the little money my mother left me. I invested everything in that restaurant with him, without even going through a lawyer. I thought he was my brother. A brother . . . he took my wife.
At first she’d come to see me three times a week in the visiting room of Baumettes prison, then twice. After eighteen months, she only came on Saturday afternoons with clean laundry and three St. Victor cookies. She would stare at her hands; I didn’t touch her anymore. A quick kiss on the cheek. She could hardly wait for the guard to show up so she could rush back into the street a half hour later.
After the trial, she stopped coming altogether. I was transferred to the penitentiary in Arles. That’s where I learned she was sleeping with him. I beat the hell out of a guard and they dragged me off to the hole. I lost six pounds and the little confidence I had in human beings.
For years, I killed that man every single day. I would imagine them together. I could hear her moaning a
nd shouting the way she did with me for almost ten years. She would fall asleep against that man’s belly and thighs. A breast in that man’s hand, the left breast, she only falls asleep on her right side. For years, I loved to fall asleep with that pretty breast in the cup of my palm. She disgusts me.
As for him, I killed him mornings, afternoons, evenings, and especially at night, in my dreams, in my nightmares, with my eyes wide open in the darkness of my cell, lit only by the searchlights shining on the outside walls.
I grew up with that man, on the same street, in the same school, we ran side by side through the same hills, in the same playgrounds, we kissed our first girls together on the sand of les Catalans Beach. He beat me at foosball a hundred times, I slaughtered him a hundred times at boccie. We never stopped laughing, even on that day when we were fifteen, hiding together in a garbage can with the cops on our ass. As soon as I turned my back, he took everything from me. I’m going to crush him like a rat!
I found this job so I could spy on him and kill him whenever I decide to. I want to see terror filling his eyes and twisting his guts, see how much he regrets his mistake before he disappears.
All day I pick olives, a stone’s throw from the village. We always called this suburb of Marseille “the village.” It’s not like any other neighborhood. When I was a kid, there used to be over a hundred truck farmers here; there must be only two or three left. Château-Gombert has remained a village curled around its church.