Marseille Noir

by Cédric Fabre

  “We can’t stay here.”

  “Did you . . . ?” She doesn’t finish her sentence.

  Maurice lets go of her—time to kneel down and check the body. He figures out the fat guy’s lying on his belly. He gropes upward, toward the head; at the neck, thick as an ox’s, Maurice feels a lukewarm, sticky substance on his fingers. “Blood . . .”

  “He’s dead?” Sarah whispers.

  “I must’ve smashed his skull in . . . Come on, let’s get out of here!”

  They run. Hand in hand. The echo of their footsteps does not attract a single nose to a window . . . Why bother? Nothing to get excited about. In their beds, the insomniacs are watching documentaries about hunting and fishing in the bluish halo of their TV sets, other night owls are drinking alone or have gotten up to eat or drink a glass of milk, and others are grasping at one another, staining their sheets . . . and in the street, fugitives: the police or some other hoods are probably in pursuit, but by the time they arrive, the fugitives are already far away. Sirens would have to stop right under your windows for it to be worth checking out.

  Maurice and Sarah don’t stop running till they get to la Plaine. They catch their breath between two cars, bent over and panting, before they cross the huge square, which is transformed at night into a parking lot. Provoking the barks of a big dog forgotten in a van . . . they walk as naturally as possible, to fool people: a nice young couple nobody would suspect of being a modern Bonnie and Clyde.

  At a street corner Maurice takes his keys out of his pocket. Only after he’s double-locked his door do they both breathe again. They calm down little by little. Leaving the room in darkness, they remain hidden behind the half-closed shutters for the time being, watching the narrow street, pricking their ears for any unusual commotion, any police sirens heading in their direction.

  Sarah wraps her arms around the young man, inhaling his sweat, while he feels the warmth of her breath on his neck. The joint is exchanged like a kiss, sticky from the lips of the other. They remain silent. He has his hand on hers and they stay there while time stands still, a thousand confused thoughts assail them, as if everything they just went through wasn’t quite real . . . United more strongly by their shared nightmare than they could ever be by the parish priest.

  They make love with the rising sun. Sarah is the first to fall asleep, wiped out by their lovemaking, after giving all she had; the sleep of a woman exorcised . . . After intermittently giving in to a restless half-sleep, he is now watching her.

  She’s beautiful. In peace. A soft light shines through the Venetian blinds, making the red wave of her hair gleam. Redheads are pretty . . . “Very classy,” Maurice mumbles to himself, thinking of the flock of trashy women on rue Saint Ferréol traipsing around the shopping center on Saturdays, brunette by nature or blond against the will of God, shouting in their shrill voices. Little by little Sarah’s distinct beauty has entered his heart and the troubadour begins to fear he’s on the brink of falling in love; that’s never advisable for a future rock star.

  What color are her eyes? Green, he thinks, slightly gray? If he remembers the color of her eyes, it’s a sign he’s in love, he thinks: suspense . . .

  From time to time, a little moan escapes from Sarah; he can’t tell if it’s from pleasure or fear, or from what she’s dreaming about. She’s sleeping on her stomach. Maurice has pulled the sheet down to her butt. He counts her beauty marks. Admires her freckles, light on her shoulders, assessing the velvet of her skin with a horse-trader’s stroke that does not wake her. Sarah is a real redhead, he knows it now . . . He has her scent on the tip of his nose, so special, inebriating and sweet.

  How many times has he opened his eyes, sober now, on a dog, white . . . or black? A complete stranger stretched out naked in his bed, a woman you have to get rid of as soon as possible. When you wake up Sunday morning it’s all different: you went to sleep with a model, and it’s a sea monster smiling at you as she says good morning. That’s the price you pay for drinking. You should never go out on Saturday nights, Saturday night is an illusion, just a little makeup . . . And what about all those skanky groupies?

  An eyelid lifts, then two. “Good morning,” she grimaces. She has big green eyes, slightly gray, and they’re having a hard time staying open . . .

  “Good morning, Sarah.” He takes pleasure in saying her name. She gives him a big smile, which suddenly shrivels up.

  “Jesus, that disgusting fat guy . . . I’d forgotten him!”

  The memories of the night before surface. That building entrance . . . her fear in the dark. The fat guy who wanted to rape her and Matt knocking him out, leaving him for dead. Their flight! The apartment as a refuge . . .

  “It’s over now,” Maurice reassures her while combing her long hair with his hand. “You have nothing to fear now.” He kisses her tenderly on the forehead.

  “But what if you . . .”

  “Who cares? Come into my arms . . .”

  Sarah obeys and curls up in his embrace. With her ear against his torso, she hears her man’s heart beating calmly. Like when she was a little girl, when she had the right to end her Sunday nights in her parents’ bed and she would snuggle up to her daddy.

  “If Daddy knew I slept here,” she sighs.

  “You think he’d raise the rent?”

  They laugh nervously.

  The morning stretches on as they go over the incident without leaving the sheets: Maurice and Sarah rewrite the story ten times over without managing to change the ending. The fat guy is almost certainly dead. But there’s no reason why it should be traced back to them. It was dark and even if neighbors heard everything without showing themselves, how could they recognize them? The investigation will go nowhere, Maurice says. People get mugged every day in Marseille, corpses are found on the sidewalks, and there are unsolved crimes all over the city. In a week, the cops will move on to something else, and until then they’ll just have to be careful: not see each other for a while, so as not to attract attention, avoid Le Petit Nice and the Haunted House, where they were seen together . . . And even if the police are looking for a young couple and make the rounds of local bars and restaurants, what would have distinguished them from hundreds of other couples aimlessly walking through the neighborhood?

  “My red jacket!”

  “Throw your red jacket in the trash.”

  “Are you crazy? It’s too beautiful!”

  “Into the closet then . . . I’ll stash it away, you’ll get it back later.”

  Silence means consent.

  “I’ll loan you my Perf when you leave. I bought it from a buddy, and anyway, it’s too short for me. It’ll fit you perfectly,” says Maurice with what sounds like regret.

  “What about my red hair?”

  “We so don’t care about your red hair! All you see are redheads these days! If you want me to, I can lend you a hat.”

  * * *

  That afternoon, you can spot a slim silhouette in a Perfecto motorcycle jacket, wearing a Che cap, her face hidden by useless sunglasses as she slinks through the city hugging the walls.

  If the fat guy’s dead, we’ll hear about it, Maurice tells himself. Consequently, he suffers through the local evening news on TV. Nothing.

  The next morning, there’s nothing in Le Provençal either. Maybe the fat guy didn’t die after all? The following days he reads all the papers, even La Marseillaise, which is harder and harder to find in cafés, what with the decline of the Communist Party and all. During the week he calls the shop a number of times to reassure Sarah, but doesn’t dare go there.

  The young woman is sticking to her word, she doesn’t say anything to anyone . . . In fact, what worries her more now is her red jacket: Maurice, prey to a fit of paranoia, hid it in the attic, where nobody ever disturbs the spiders, in the unlikely event that the police show up to search his place; that’s what happens when you watch too many crime shows on TV . . .

  Walking around as if nothing happened, he sees that nothing see
ms to have changed on the streets of Marseille. The pedestrians he passes don’t seem to suspect in him the criminal he has become. Visibly, no one seems to care, from the baker who gives him back his change to the bum holding out his hand to ask for it. The mistral has begun to blow, cutting through bodies with its icy blade. Sarah has put away her miniskirts and open heels, once again wrapped up in her winter clothes.

  In Marseille, you go from summer to Siberia as soon as the mistral blows. On market days in la Plaine, when the vendors have left, hundreds of abandoned plastic bags fly off in all directions and get stuck on branches, more decorated now than Christmas trees. The road workers do their best to fight the wind, and Sarah’s father is struggling, his hands freezing despite his gloves. Backed up by the team of motorized sweepers that push heaps of trash toward the gutters with powerful jets of water, the sweepers on foot have to redouble their efforts to get to the end of it. Nonetheless collecting what can be recycled, like hangers for Sarah’s shop: her boss likes them and Sarah likes to please her. But on those days, it’s out of the question to make the rounds of the cafés to grab “a quick cup of coffee”: it’s not exactly a racket, more like a gift, renewed all year long by the café owners to thank the garbagemen for cleaning up out front.

  During the day, la Plaine is a very lively neighborhood, with constant traffic jams, for the city’s traffic plan was drafted by madmen. The incurable desynchronization of traffic lights doesn’t help. At night it’s just the opposite, it’s a desert. And a paradise for rats and seagulls, who finish the road workers’ job with such enthusiasm that it’s obvious they’re not members of the Force Ouvrière. Every evening, at the corner of rue des Trois Mages, faithful to her post, an old Eskimo woman in rags waits till it’s past midnight. She’s not there because of the snow—we get snow here once every ten years. She stands there at the red light offering bread and pastries stuffed in big plastic bags to the drivers. It’s surplus from the nearby bakery which she sells these latecomers for next to nothing; what she doesn’t sell, she distributes to the pigeons the next day, to the annoyance of the many neighborhood grouches.

  Ever since the other night, because he’s afraid of venturing any farther and because he can’t be bothered to cook, Maurice has eaten lunch at Dirigible, a sandwich stand in the heart of the square. Among the bums waiting in line for their baguette stuffed with meatballs, how many know that this modest establishment owes its strange name to the takeoff, on this very spot, of a hot-air balloon which crossed the Mediterranean for the first time in 1886? The young man learned this by turning around to look at a girl and raising his eyes by chance to the plaque nobody ever notices that decorates the wall of the old post office building. Marseille is the oldest city in Europe, but you’d think it has no history . . . Under construction for the last 2,600 years, and nothing appears to be properly finished or durably built. It doesn’t even have a historic downtown like you find in the smallest provincial sub-prefecture! The Yanks, our cousins in the New World, have some houses over there older than in Marseille, which permanently self-destructs rather than constructs, without the slightest respect for its old stones. For Marseille doesn’t take care of itself, as it’s been governed forever by a commercial aristocracy absorbed in its own business, which scorns the city and its working people, who’ve come here from all over the seven seas in search of a better life. And when, as bad luck would have it, Greek or Roman remains are discovered—something that happens at every strike of the pickax—there is only one pressing concern: bury them so as not to delay construction. Otherwise, the Phocaean city, as we call it, could live for a long time off the tourists who come to see its ancient monuments, like Pompeii . . . But here the concrete mixers turn like drums in a washing machine. Their main use is to launder cash.

  Once, as he’s getting ready to bite into a tournedos omelet, Maurice sees Sarah passing by in the distance . . . but he doesn’t dare go meet her.

  * * *

  Maurice plunges ahead. He hesitated for a long time before he dared to cross his Rubicon. To cross la Plaine and venture back into the meandering little streets that separate it from cours Julien. To return to the scene of the crime. His beard has grown and with his dark glasses and his tuque, you’d take him for Serpico. He has to find out, he can’t stand it anymore. For all this time, not one word in the papers; even at the neighborhood bar, he never heard a word about the incident. He finally told himself that if the fat guy was dead, he would have heard something, right? And yet there was all that blood . . . and that sound of broken bones when the colossus thudded facedown onto the ground. The light turns red, the pedestrian symbol turns green: alea jacta est, the die is cast!

  On the other side of the crosswalk, he leaves his territory: an imaginary border traced inside his head, beyond which he’s in trouble. First of all, la Plaine is his home, and then, there’s plenty of space, it’s bustling, and with market days and the line at the post office, there’s all the animation an assassin might need to blend into the crowd and sink into anonymity. While in the narrow adjacent streets where few people walk by, you’re careful to avoid the eyes of passersby; it immediately seems to him that everybody sees only him and he could be recognized. His heart starts beating hard, his throat tightens. He could still turn around but now he’s already reached the next street. The fat guy’s street. The entrance appears to be outlined with a dark border. Maurice breathes in deeply and resumes walking—he’s aware he’s going forward even though he no longer feels his legs beneath him. The doorway is getting nearer. A lady’s rear end appears in the entranceway, moving backward. The door is growing larger in front of his very eyes; this time his heart actually stops beating, but he keeps moving forward. The fat guy is standing there, talking to the lady. The top of his head is bandaged. He doesn’t seem to notice Maurice, who walks by like a zombie.

  “It’s horrible, why would anybody go after such a nice animal?” says the fat guy.

  “You should get another one,” she advises him. “Such a nice little dog!”

  All the compassion in the world is expressed in the woman’s voice, but from her very first words, Maurice understands that she would gladly bring back the death penalty for killers of little dogs and, as if the cold blade of the guillotine had landed on his neck, he feels a shiver pass through him—the Yorkshire terrier! The terrier is no longer around, running between his master’s legs. It’s the dog that died, crushed by its master’s weight. That sinister crack . . .

  “It’s still too soon,” laments the man with the bandaged head. “Later, maybe . . .”

  Maurice can still hear the guy’s voice without understanding his words any better. He walks away, amazed that no one stops him. The sun is shining at the other end of the street. He’s almost there . . . He’s there! He turns . . . and starts running like mad toward cours Julien, its fountain and its trees, the tables of the restaurants set for lunch, and toward all those people, toward life, this beautiful life, toward freedom!

  The fat guy isn’t dead and in a second it’s ancient history in Maurice’s head. God knows what version of his unfortunate four-legged companion’s death the fat guy has invented for his neighbors . . . But that filthy asshole certainly won’t have bragged about his attempted rape. It’s no longer their concern. Maurice and Sarah are free.

  PART IV

  Always Outward Bound

  THE RED MULE

  by MINNA SIF

  Belsunce

  Kevin posted the selfie with his head down and a big smile, squeezing the crotch of the green bull statue on display under the Ombrière—the polished steel sunroof in front of the Vieux-Port. He was enjoying the warm, springlike weather of this February afternoon in 2013. The city was the European Capital of Culture for the year. Herds of painted plastic animals lorded it all over the city. Kevin was a mule, working for the narco-jihad. One of thousands. He’d taken a certain pleasure in roaming through Europe for two years now, successfully trafficking cocaine and heroin, covering his traces for
the anti-Jihadist cells as well as those of OCTRIS (the Central Office for the Repression of Trafficking Illicit Narcotics). The young man did good work. His predecessor’s corpse had been found in a battered van converted into a whorehouse at the Belgian border. That asshole! He tried to outsmart everybody, Kevin sneered, as he posted self-portraits with a huge grin on his Facebook page. The mule before him, a cocaine addict, had begun to do business for himself and would subtract a few kilos of powder from the Organization to sell them off on the side. After slashing the guy’s neck on the orders of his bosses, Kevin had relieved the guy of seventy-eight little packets, close to 568 grams of coke that the man had been planning to sneak into Belgium. He had a spasm of nausea when he recalled the scene of his disemboweling. So much shit in one body!

  Kevin got high a lot, but he had a strict rule: never touch the employer’s merchandise. This was his eighth mission and for the first time in his life he’d put a little money aside. Seventy thousand euros, to be exact, stashed in a plastered-up hole in the wall of his father’s house in Roubaix. While waiting for better days, he lived an ordinary life as a tourist out for a good time, with his camera and videocam slung across his shoulder. He’d been recruited by a guy who called himself an imam in la Santé where Kevin had spent three years for armed robbery. To work in the narco-jihad, you had to convert to Islam, but it was a pure formality. The young man also took advantage of those missions to pay visits to the narco’s branches—fly-by-night mosques, garages, or cellars in poor neighborhoods of the cities he passed through. Places run by ex-hoods turned apocalyptic preachers who rounded up young misfits dreaming of taking up arms in the name of God. Puny little runts on Rohypnol who trained for combat holed up in their rooms watching DVDs of guerillas in kaffiyehs. On those occasions Kevin would put on the traditional kashaba. He made a point of being scrupulous in all things.