Marseille Noir

by Cédric Fabre

  At noon, I have the day’s special at a café right across from our restaurant. I still dare to say “our”. . . Alone at my little table, hidden behind a curtain, I watch. Nobody can recognize me. I wear a cap, glasses, and a mustache. I tell the young waitress I’m picking olives on chemin de Palama.

  My hands are red with cold and scraped by branches. From time to time, I see someone I knew in school come in, a shopkeeper, a troublemaker . . . They don’t even notice me. I could be Portuguese, Moroccan, a seasonal worker. Who still picks olives here? Aside from poets and madmen. All my old buddies are hiding out in the city or selling drugs and anything that falls off a truck.

  On my street, nobody made it and nobody gives a damn. “Take it easy . . .” That’s what they’ve been saying from morning to night ever since they were born, with a pair of boccie balls in their hands. “Take it easy . . .” Their fathers used to say it, their grandfathers too, in every bar in Marseille. You can hear the clack of boccie balls all around the memorial to the war dead and, for some time now, behind the church, where we used to fight over Lui, Playboy, and Penthouse when we were twelve, all those blond girls perched on their high heels or leaning forward under the weight of their heavy breasts that made our pants tight and our mouths dry.

  I came upon the ad last week in La Provence. Mademoiselle Niozelles was looking for someone to pick her olives in Château-Gombert. The name jumped out at me like a cat: Château-Gombert. I jumped on my bike and was the first to arrive. It wasn’t even eight in the morning.

  We decided to share the crop. That’s what’s been done here forever. Mademoiselle Niozelles is a widow, but she’s still young. She would have given me ideas if I hadn’t come here with five years of hate in my belly. She’s a schoolteacher who owns about a hundred olive trees around her little pink house with a dovecote next to it. We had coffee in her kitchen. There is a lot of discretion and sensitivity in her eyes. She didn’t ask me a single question. I had the feeling she could see my life palpitating under my skin. Her students must love her. She’s calm and luminous like this month of November.

  I got to work the same day. I hung a basket around my neck, on my belly, and we went to get a little ladder under a shed before she left for school.

  “It’s a very good year,” she said as she walked away, “I don’t remember seeing so many for ages. It must’ve rained at the right time.”

  I like that expression she uses, belle lurette, “for ages.” I didn’t think a teacher would use it. Mademoiselle Niozelles doesn’t look like a teacher, she’s like wild grass. She’s like no one else.

  The olive trees are planted on narrow terraces held up by little walls made of stones as white as bones. They’re literally collapsing under the weight of the olives, as if to say, Give us some relief, we can’t take it anymore.

  They’re still green, full of water, hard, and so strongly attached to the branches that you have to really tug to get them to cascade down into the basket. They’re Aglandau olives, perfectly oval. On the trees with the best exposure, they’re already purple, you can see the oil under the skin. I notice that a little farther on they’re as big as plums. I’ll keep those for the days when I’m tired or the mistral is blowing. I’m going to pick all these olives and then I’ll kill the man who filled my blood with poison.

  I watch the sun turn around the village. It’s a fine day, calm and blue. From here, in the midst of the hills, all the houses are golden. I spot the façade of the one I grew up in, the windows of the kitchen and our bedroom. I say “our” because I slept in my parents’ room for a long time and so did my sister. I liked to sleep near my mother’s breath. Who now lives in that house where I was so happy?

  My parents are far away, and yet here nothing has really changed and my childhood is everywhere. When I got here I spotted two or three irrigation basins, the last surviving farms, and the canal we’d dive into every summer at the risk of drowning. The iron wheels of the trolley and the canal were my mother’s two nightmares. We used to swim with the current and grab onto a huge sluice gate at the last minute. If we missed it, we couldn’t get out: the walls of the canal were slippery with mud and much too high. We’d be trapped like a rat.

  One day Maurice missed it, he was carried away in the current and sucked into the pipe. He disappeared into the tunnel under the road. They found his body two days later in another pipe at Plan-de-Cuques.

  Perched in an olive tree, I see the canal gleaming. It twists and turns through the fields, disappears between the houses that didn’t used to exist, gleams again for a moment, very far off between two concrete giants, and loses itself in a vertical Marseille where the setting sun is exploding a million windowpanes. For three minutes, they fill up with blood.

  Like every day, I take a break from picking at noon. I empty my basket of olives into big green plastic crates and go have lunch at the little café. I have my own table. The young waitress shows me to it with a little smile and a knowing look. How could she imagine that I’m lying in wait for a man so I can rip his heart out? A guy who orders the day’s special, has his coffee, and leaves discreetly to go out into an olive field can only inspire confidence. I always tip her two euros.

  I can see the three other cafés on the square from my observation post. At the Bar du Centre we used to play foosball every night and howl with laughter, at Terminus we’d watch soccer games on a big screen, from the sidewalk seats of Café de la Poste we’d watch the girls go by as we sipped our milk grenadines.

  A lot of stores’ signs have changed. The little Casino grocery has become Newspapers Tobacco; an electronics store has replaced the butcher’s; the wine merchant is gone. The Chez Georges barber shop has become a real estate agency. The Mazet patisserie, where I had the best rum baba in my life, is still there; the photography studio owned by the Cayrol family is still there too. Those are the two village institutions. Only the Cayrol son could recognize me despite my mustache and glasses. He has the portrait of each of us in his mind’s eye at every stage of our lives, in every class. He’s the village memory. If he turned up, I’d run straight to the bathroom or hide my head behind a newspaper.

  It’s not the Cayrol son who I see all of a sudden, but the traitor. Yes, him, Franck, the man I’ve been waiting for, over a week now, the man I’m going to kill.

  I don’t know if I said his name was Franck. For me, he doesn’t have a face anymore, no name, no past. He’s already dead.

  He comes out of a magnificent gray Mercedes with black leather seats, double-parked right in front of my eyes. He walks into our restaurant on the other side of the street and comes out almost immediately. He starts the car and then walks back in three minutes later. I’ve never seen him so well dressed—in a navy-blue Lacoste jacket. A prince! For eight years, I was in hell.

  I pay for my meal and take a short walk around the village. I have no problem spotting the luxurious Mercedes. He parks it on boulevard Fernand Durbec, where we grew up. I’ve got him.

  I walk by our restaurant again. It’s no longer called Le Petit Farci but La Coupole. Why La Coupole? No idea. I think it’s pretentious, stupid, and it doesn’t make me hungry. It makes me think of some kind of meeting, or a sect.

  I take a look at the menu of the day, written in chalk on a huge slate standing on the sidewalk.

  Tartare of salmon with lemon juice and dill

  Sea bass with basil and garlic pistou

  Opera golden square cake

  Orange and lemon cream

  I’m staggered. I walk on. He went into semi-high cuisine and apparently it works. He doesn’t drive a little Twingo. He loves money like a shark loves blood. He’s got the money, he’ll have the blood.

  To think that I held up a truck coming out of the Seita tobacco factory with two hundred thousand euros’ worth of cigarettes to buy myself a lousy apartment. The one I’d just spent eight years in measured fifteen square feet and stank of moist bread, disinfectant, and misery. And this piece of shit drives a Mercedes, dresses li
ke a cabinet minister on vacation at Cap Ferret, and he’s screwing my wife.

  I can see the steely eyes of the DA behind his glasses again: “Armed robbery, attempted homicide. We recommend fifteen years.”

  I try to calm my hands by dropping olives into the basket. They vibrate all afternoon.

  * * *

  One evening when I was seven or eight, I climbed onto my mother’s lap and she began to read me The Count of Monte Cristo. For months, every evening I would sit on her lap as she read me the extraordinary story of that man locked up in the bowels of a dismal fortress for fourteen years. She read me the story of that man’s suffering and then his escape and his implacable vengeance on every one of the traitors who’d sent him away to rot in a cell below sea level.

  For me, Edmond Dantès was the greatest, most beautiful man in Marseille. Justice wasn’t judges, DAs, and jailers, it was that man who’d learned philosophy underground and who defended life.

  I saw him everywhere: in the streets, in my dreams, on the school blackboard. My mother’s voice reverberated throughout my body every night. I would put my head on her warm bosom and listen to the story of Edmond Dantès; I could hear my mother’s heartbeat, hear the sea pounding against the dark rocks of Château d’If.

  * * *

  I was in a field a few hundred yards from the kitchen where my mother used to take me on her lap every night, and I heard her voice, I felt all her gentleness, the enormous strength of her love. What had happened to me?

  I picked olives all afternoon in the beautiful blond light in the hollow of the hills. I was alone and I was telling myself that if I didn’t have to kill a man, I would probably feel happiness right here, behind the pink house of Mademoiselle Niozelles.

  I worked till night fell. As soon as the sun disappeared, the clouds became big red birds; a minute later, the birds were black.

  I loaded my crates into Mademoiselle Niozelles’s old Renault van and drove them to the mill.

  Every two or three days, I bring my olives to this modern mill; they weigh the contents of my crates, they give me a printout that details how many kilos my crop has increased every day. From dawn to nightfall, I can sometimes pick up to seventy kilos. When they’re violet and big as plums, my basket is always full.

  I went home to a steep little street in the shadow of a church—downtown, as suburbanites say. I took a scalding shower and sawed off the butt and the double barrels of the twelve-caliber my father had hunted with all his life. I slipped a cartridge of buckshot into each barrel and went to bed. I fell asleep even before my head hit the pillow. And if I wanted to make a bad pun, I’d say I fell into a leaden sleep.

  The next morning, I arrived at Mademoiselle Niozelles’s house with the daylight; her shutters were still closed. The grass was soaking wet under the trees. I chose the first olive tree the sun strikes on the highest terrace. It caught fire before my eyes and I felt the warm fingers of the first rays of sunlight on my shoulders.

  Never had I been so calm. In the saddlebag of my old bike there was my father’s twelve-caliber and in its sawed-off barrels, two cartridges capable of ripping the head off of a hundred-kilo boar. The sky was clear, the horizon limpid on the Allauch side, and the Pilon du Roi was glittering above the hills.

  Again I worked hard all day. At twilight, I put my olive crates away in Mademoiselle Niozelles’s garage. I grabbed a dark coat hanging on a peg among other old work clothes. It must have belonged to Mademoiselle Niozelles’s father or husband. It smelled of grass and old dust.

  I parked my bike at the very end of boulevard Fernand Durbec, in front of the elementary school I’d gone to for almost ten years.

  The gray Mercedes was there, more or less in the same spot as the day before, right in front of the little movie house where I’d seen so many films long ago, every Thursday, with Laurel and Hardy, Fernandel, or Charlie Chaplin. The narrow theater had been closed “for ages,” as Mademoiselle Niozelles would have said. Now you could read above the entrance: Marseille Department of Sanitation.

  I pulled up my collar. The night was very dark now. I started walking down one side of the street, then the other, without ever taking my eyes off the gray Mercedes. Through my pocket I could feel the twelve-caliber I was holding under my coat, against my thigh. I had put on thin leather gloves so as to leave no trace in Franck’s car.

  The mistral had risen—people were going home with their heads buried in their necks, nobody was looking at anybody else. There was only the hoarse sound of the dead leaves scraping over the asphalt of the boulevard.

  Just once, I made a little detour by the restaurant; only three customers were sitting at a table near the bar. The whole village was deserted. It was really the first evening of winter. All there was in the streets was silence and dogs.

  I saw him come out fast on the first stroke of nine. He wasn’t looking at anything either. Toward what warmth was he rushing with his head down? From afar, he unlocked his car and jumped in. I unlocked the safety of the rifle with my thumb.

  Just as he was about to close his door, he caught a glimpse of me. He turned his head and saw the two dark eyes of the sawed-off shotgun looking right into his eyes. My ice-cold blood was beating through my whole body.

  “It’s you?” he managed to utter. His mouth remained agape. In this suburb where I’d spent so many years, he was the only one who recognized me.

  “It’s me, Franck. Eight years later. Seemed long to you?”

  “What are you doing here, Charlie? I heard you got out . . . I was glad to hear it. Why didn’t you—”

  “Shut up, Franck! Put your hands on your head! You move one centimeter, I rip it off. There are two loads of buckshot inside and you know I’m quick.”

  He did exactly as I asked. I opened the back door and sat down behind him. Now he had the two barrels on the right side of his head.

  “Close the door and start the car!”

  “Charlie, you’re really fucking up now, you’re gonna go back there for twenty more years.”

  “Close your door! I won’t say it again!”

  He obeyed immediately.

  “Start the car!”

  “Charlie, I’ll give you all I have—the car, the restaurant, everything . . . the house. We’ll go have a bite, Charlie, and I’ll give you everything.”

  I pushed the double barrel against his temple.

  He turned the key and put the car into reverse with a grinding sound. His whole body was vibrating now. He glanced to the right then to the left; the village was even more deserted, dismal.

  “Take Palama and stop when you get to the canal.”

  He did it. In an instant, the car was filled with the smell of fear. A ghastly stench I had only smelled in prison—from a pedophile they’d mistakenly put in my cell who had inmates waiting for him in the corridor to cut him up. A smell every man or beast recognizes right away, even if he’s never encountered it. A primal smell, wild and revolting. The age-old odor of instinct.

  “Park over there.”

  I heard his ring clacking against the steering wheel, maybe his teeth clacking too. Years of terror had taken over his body and there was nothing he could do about it.

  “Please, Charlie,” he stammered, “please, please, anything you want . . .” He was almost screaming. “I have the money from the cash register!”

  “Pass me the keys.”

  He gave them to me over his shoulder. I got out of the Mercedes and opened the door.

  “Get out!”

  He was now incapable of doing anything. He almost fell as he tried to get out of his seat. His legs couldn’t carry him anymore. I saw long threads of drool shining in the moonlight.

  “Climb up on the bank!”

  He slipped on the grass three times. His sweat was stinking up the night. We found ourselves on the little dirt track that runs along the canal.

  He began to drone out disconnected phrases that helped him make his way through the night. He seemed drunk.

  �
��Remember, Charlie . . . We . . . we . . . we used to swim here when we were ten . . . You’d dive off the bridge . . . you . . . And the soccer team, Charlie, the goal you scored in Endoume . . . at least forty yards out. I did something dumb, Charlie, you’re my only friend . . . Smash my face in if you want, but spare me, please, please, I’m a schmuck, but I’m your friend . . . I’ll give you everything . . . Tomorrow morning, we’ll go to the bank and I’ll give you everything! She’s the one who came to see me, Charlie, I swear, I tried to help her, I—”

  “And you helped her into bed.”

  “People say all kinds of things, please! You’re going to do something crazy, Charlie. You’ll be sorry all your life. Your whole life, you’ll see what you did! You’re not a killer, Charlie, you’re the most—”

  “I’m not killing anybody. You’re going to commit suicide. In two days, they’ll find your body in the spot where they found Maurice’s body. Remember little Maurice? You’re going to go through the pipes all the way to Plan-de-Cuques.”

  He fell to his knees. His joints were failing him, each of his tendons, every nerve in his body. Terror was twisting his face, shiny with drool and snot. His mouth was a horrible wound and a long sawing sound was coming out of it.

  “You’re not just a bastard, you’re a coward, Franck. I remember what the lawyer René Floriot said about his client, Dr. Petiot: He walked to the scaffold as if he were going to the dentist. Think of Dr. Petiot. Stand up and look me in the eye!”

  I stuck the double barrels to his forehead.

  “Get up and climb onto the wall. I’m giving you a chance. You remember the sluice fifty yards from here, on the other side of the canal? We hung onto it hundreds of times. If you can grab it, I’ll let you live; if not, you go through the pipe.”

  “They’ll arrest you, Charlie, you’ll go back there for life . . . Please . . . please . . . please . . . don’t do this!”