“You’ve never tried to find out who killed your father?”
The scorn in his dark eyes grew.
“If you think I don’t see you coming with your hobnailed boots! I didn’t know this Martinez and I didn’t kill him.”
“Why are you active in the Collective Contra Nostalgeria if it isn’t to settle accounts?”
“I want to settle accounts only with History. No question of letting killers pose as martyrs. That monument in honor of the OAS is already a scandal. The fact that it could be put up in a public place is a scandal. The people whose names are inscribed on it—do you know what they did?”
“The principal names were crushed with a sledgehammer.”
“Bastien-Thiry, Degueldre, Dovecar, and Piegts, those are the names! Four killers sentenced to death by the French Republic and shot, some of them for having tried to assassinate General de Gaulle, and others—well, precisely!—for having killed cops. Do you think it’s O.K. that today monuments to them are put up with the complicity of the public authorities?”
“No.”
This direct response threw Abbas off balance. Sebag continued, blowing cold after blowing warm:
“But destroying that monument is nonetheless a crime. If you weren’t the one who did it, where were you the night it happened?”
“Duty is duty, right? I told you the police would never change. You claim to be against this monument, but you’re prepared to arrest and put in prison the person who destroyed it. That was the logic used by your predecessors who helped deport the Jews in 1940. In thirty years of activism, I’ve learned to mistrust the police. I know it’s better not to say anything. First you demand an alibi, then it will be my fingerprints—your colleague already asked for them, moreover—and finally a sample of my DNA. And once I’m in your files, anything can happen.”
Sebag patiently listened to this anti-cop diatribe. For someone who didn’t talk much, Abbas was beginning to talk a lot. Words eliciting words, it was better to let them come out.
When Abbas finally stopped, Sebag slipped in amiably:
“It’s certain that your fingerprints would make our job easier. Martinez’s murderer left us some beautiful ones. All we need to do is compare them to prove your innocence.”
“And did you find any on the monument?”
Sebag had to admit that they hadn’t.
“You see,” Abbas said triumphantly. “That’s not enough to clear me of everything you want to blame on me. If you want to hassle me, nothing will keep you from continuing to do it.”
“Except the alibi . . . ”
“Does it seem to you that we’re going around in circles?” Abbas retorted.
Sebag rubbed his eyes, then suddenly relaxed.
“O.K., you’re right. We’re going to end this. Do you want something to drink? How about a glass of water, would that do?”
Abbas hesitated before turning down the offer with a wave of his hand.
“If you don’t mind, I’m thirsty,” said Sebag, getting up.
The lieutenant left the room and went to get a cup of water at the fountain in the middle of the corridor. He ran into a young woman cop in uniform and for a few seconds remained so spellbound by her blue, almond-shaped eyes that he forgot to respond to her greeting. He drank his water, threw the cup in the bin, and filled another one. Back in his office, he set the cup in front of Abbas.
“Just in case . . . ”
He moved back toward the door.
“I’m going to get my colleague for the official report on your testimony.”
Molina was already deep in his game. Sebag waited patiently in the doorway.
“You couldn’t get anything out of him, either?” Molina asked, without raising his eyes from the screen.
“No, it’s pointless to waste any more of our time.”
Molina consented to pause his game.
“Do you think he has nothing to do with our two cases?”
“Objectively, we have no reason to implicate or clear him.”
“And subjectively?”
“I may be mistaken, but I don’t see him as a killer, and especially not as a cold-blooded killer. And then he’s married, has children, a job, and friends . . . No, I just can’t imagine it. Obviously, if the investigation into Martinez’s past proves that the little old man played a role in the murder of Abbas’s father, I’ll reconsider my view.”
“What about the monument?”
“He chose collective action in broad daylight, and I’d find it odd if he suddenly started attacking the monument with a hammer at night.”
“But somebody did it! Somebody who wasn’t fond of the OAS!”
“Are you fond of the OAS?”
“No, but I don’t see the connection . . . ”
“I mean that so long as we’re not sure that the damage is linked to the murder and vice versa, I don’t give a damn who destroyed that monument. It was ugly, anyway . . . ”
“I’m not sure they see things that way at the prefecture.”
“It’s true that to keep the peace between these communities, it’d be better that there be no more acts like that one. I’d forgotten that aspect of things.”
Molina got up and joined Sebag in the hallway.
“To sum up, in your view Abbas is pure as the driven snow?”
“That’s how I see it, yes.”
“If Madame Irma says so . . . ”
Molina trusted his partner’s intuitions, but never missed a chance to make fun of them. When they entered Llach’s office, Sebag noted with satisfaction that the water cup was empty. He let Molina sit down in front of the computer. Jacques reread the report out loud, occasionally looking up to see if Abbas agreed. But Abbas remained motionless on his chair, his fingers drumming on his thighs. When he finished reading, Molina hit the print button.
He collected the printed sheets to present them to Abbas. He handed him a pen as well.
“I don’t want to sign it.”
Molina took back the report.
“What you said committed you to nothing, but O.K.,” he said with annoyance. “That’s your right. You can go now, we have nothing more to say to each other.”
Then he added, wanting to sound threatening:
“For the time being.”
“I understood that.”
For the first time, he’d smiled. Sebag opened the door for him.
“Take the stairway at the end of the hall. At the bottom, just push the button on your right to open the door.”
He stepped aside to let Abbas pass. Abbas started to hold out his hand and then thought better of it. He left the office, but once he was in the hallway, he hesitated.
“I . . . if . . . you . . . ”
Abbas looked down at his feet.
“If by chance in the course of your investigation . . . ”
He looked up at Sebag. His eyes were no longer so dark.
“If you discover that this Martinez or one of his buddies played a role in my father’s murder, would you tell me?”
Sebag no longer had in front of him a ferocious and battle-hardened activist but a kid whose father had been taken away from him too soon.
“Of course!” He grinned. “Then you’d be our prime suspect.”
“Of course, how stupid I am . . . ”
He turned on his heel, went down the hallway, and disappeared.
“Go ahead, give him a big kiss while you’re at it!”
Molina, standing up, was furious.
“That guy has been screwing with us for four hours and you whisper sweet nothings to him? It won’t hurt too much, do you want a little Vaseline? And on top of that, you give him a glass of water. Why not a cup of coffee? Oh, yeah, that’s right, you think the coffee here is too disgusting!”
Molina went to
grab the cup and throw it in the trashcan. Sebag shouted:
“Stop!”
Jacques froze before he’d touched the cup. Sebag pointed to the desk.
“In the bottom drawer on the left: Llach always keeps plastic bags there.”
Molina, taken aback, obeyed without saying a word. Sebag took the bag and slipped the paper cup Abbas had used into it. Molina let out a long whistle: he’d just understood. Sebag handed the plastic bag back to him.
“Here, you’ve got his prints if you want them, and also a bit of his DNA.”
“You could have taken the opportunity to pull out one of his hairs, while you were at it,” Molina laughed. He was in a better mood.
“So far as that’s concerned, we don’t need to do an analysis. The guy still has brown hair, despite his fifty-four years.”
Molina wrote a made-up name on a self-adhesive label.
“All this isn’t very legal, Lieutenant Sebag.”
“So? And if it ends up definitively removing Abbas from our list of suspects, he won’t hold it against us. But then of course he’ll never know anything about it.”
“And if we find that they are the murderer’s prints?”
“Then we won’t be able to use these prints as evidence, but we’ll have no trouble getting others. But frankly, I don’t think he’s the killer. And neither do you.”
“Unfortunately, I don’t.”
Molina stuck the label on the plastic bag.
“I’ll take care of this right away. It’s Friday; if we want to have the result before Monday . . . ”
Sebag went back to their office. He sat in front of Molina’s computer and finished his game. He enjoyed it, and started another one.
The analysis of the prints came in quickly and confirmed their views. Abbas hadn’t killed Martinez. Sebag immediately informed Castello. Then he began giving serious thought to his weekend. The weather report predicted a very pleasant Saturday—sun, mild temperatures, and moderate wind—but another big storm was supposed to come in on Sunday.
CHAPTER 17
Yalla, René, I don’t want to annoy you, or criticize people from Oran, I had plenty of friends in Oran, but the truth is . . . the calentita was good only in Algiers. That’s to be expected: it was the capital, after all.”
“Shut up, Roger, the real name of that dish is not calentita but calentica!”
A long table filled the whole of the Pied-Noir Circle’s main meeting room. About thirty people were lined up along it, including Gilles and Claire. Once a month, the members of the association recreated the atmosphere they’d known in Algeria long enough to eat a couscous.
In the old days. Back there. The Sebags, who knew nothing about Algiers before independence, felt as if they’d been thrust into a film by Alexandre Arcady. The setting was colorful, the ambiance extremely enjoyable, and the actors excellent, even if they hammed it up a bit.
Claire’s neighbors were pursuing their culinary squabble. Sitting across from Gilles, Guy Albouker’s wife gave them a quick explanation:
“A calentita—in Oran, they call it a calentica—is a kind of flan made with chickpea flour and olive oil. It’s eaten steaming hot, usually between two slices of bread.”
She turned to her neighbor on the left, the aforementioned Roger:
“It took me years to make a calentita that more or less resembled the ones we ate back then.”
“You succeeded? My word, you’re the woman I should have married, my poor Josiane has never been able to make a good one.”
“And do you know why?”
“No, but you’re going to tell me, I’ll bet.”
“I don’t know . . . ”
“Yalla, don’t make me wait . . . ”
“Well, just because it’s you . . . The secret, in fact, is the chickpeas. I used to buy them at the supermarket, but they’re not the same. When I ate the calentita made by my sister-in-law in Montpellier, it was so good that tears came to my eyes. And do you know why?”
“Well, no, I don’t! You haven’t yet told me, for heaven’s sake.”
“My sister-in-law buys her chickpeas from a little Arab who imports them directly from Algeria. Since then, every time I go to Montpellier, I come back with several kilos of chickpeas.”
“Give the address to Josiane, I don’t want to die without having eaten that again!”
“Who’s talking about dying,” another guest three seats farther on shouted at him. “You’re always the one who talks the loudest, you’ll bury us all.”
Guy Albouker had invited Sebag to come to the couscous party this Saturday evening. The lieutenant would have liked to decline the invitation, but he’d been afraid that his refusal might rub the officials of this influential association the wrong way. In the current context, that wouldn’t have been very smart. And then Claire had been immediately enthusiastic about it.
Another bowl full of couscous was set down on the table. Gilles accepted a second helping. He’d never eaten such good couscous.
Claire declined a second helping but nonetheless picked choice morsels off her husband’s plate. Guy Albouker came and joined them. He’d spent half the meal moving around to talk with everyone. He gave his wife a little poke with his elbow.
“Marie, you’re failing to do your duty, our guests’ glasses are empty.”
Without asking, he filled their glasses with a Sidi Brahim as dark as blood.
“Didn’t you like it?” he said anxiously when he saw that Claire’s plate was empty.
“It was delicious, but I’m no longer hungry.”
She added, stealing a chickpea from Gilles’s plate:
“But you see that I’m still eating a little more out of pure gluttony.”
“My daughter doesn’t like couscous,” René from Oran said, a wine-laden sob in his voice. “She likes the vegetables all right, but she won’t touch the semolina. She doesn’t like calentica, either.”
“Oh, dear, that sounds like a psychological problem,” Marie Albouker said.
“Yes, yes, yes, I know it’s psychological . . . And that’s exactly why it’s so sad. For my daughter, our Algeria is like the castle in Sleeping Beauty, she stopped believing in it when she grew up.”
“She might change her mind, you know,” Albouker said, trying to reassure him. “I was the same way until a few years ago. I didn’t want to hear anything about Algeria. How many times I argued with my parents and told them they had to figure out how to get over it. And then from the day my father died, I picked up the torch. Without having thought about it before. It came all at once. After the burial, I accompanied my mother back to their house, and there were a couple of magazines put out by Pied-Noir associations lying around. I took them all home with me, and a few days later I transferred the subscriptions to my own name. And you see, now I’m here with you.”
“Yeah, with you it’s different . . . You lived in Algeria.”
“So little. I was six years old.”
“Nonetheless, that matters. My daughter was born in 1971 and she has always lived here. She feels more Catalan than Pied-Noir.”
“That’s what she tells you to drive you crazy. And who knows, she probably says something entirely different to her own children.”
For a moment, René gazed silently at the rest of the wine in his glass. He turned it around with a little movement of his wrist. Then he went on:
“It’s true that my grandsons know our history surprisingly well. They have often astonished me. Do you think their mother talks to them about Algeria?”
“Certainly,” Marie said encouragingly.
René finished his glass and held it out to Albouker.
“Po po po, go ahead, son, give me a little more sun and life.”
Albouker poured him more wine. The culinary discussion resumed immediately. This time it was about c
réponnet. A kind of sherbet, Sebag seemed to understand.
“The best of all was in Bab-El-Oued, I tell you,” Roger from Algiers said. “I’m not sure about who made it, but the name was something like Grosoli.”
Since Albouker was not participating in this discussion, Claire asked him a question.
“Your rejection of Algeria for so many years is astonishing. Why did you change your mind so late and so suddenly?”
“I think that at first it hurt too much, and in order to avoid suffering, I denied it as much as I could. And then I also wanted to belong here, I refused to be a Pied-Noir, I wanted to be French like everyone else. But that was impossible: those of us who returned from Algeria can’t be French people like the others.”
“Why not?”
“Most of my friends who are here will tell you that it’s because we loved France too much and it betrayed us, but I think that’s a little simplistic. In fact, we loved a France that wasn’t the true one. We were living far away and we lived France as a fantasy. My parents were both born in Algiers and the first time they set foot in metropolitan France was in 1962. They really didn’t know anything about this country.”
He poured himself another glass of wine. He forgot to fill Gilles’s glass but not Claire’s.
“Our France was the eternal France of our history classes in elementary school, but it was very close to our hearts. Our France was the France of the 1930 centenary celebration of the conquest of Algeria. At that time, the colonization of Algeria was the glory of France, and the colonist was seen as a courageous and hardworking man, a hero, a veritable cowboy of the Far South. Those of us who lived in Algeria saw things that way in the autumn of 1954, when the war began, and we still did in 1962, when the war ended. We didn’t understand the changes that had taken place so rapidly in the other France, the true France, your France. For the metropolitan French, we were no long heroes but rich exploiters, unjust and racist. The glory of France had become its shame. And this biased view has become a historical truth. We’d like a more complex understanding of our history: that’s why we’re so attached to the monuments that celebrate this memory.”
Claire, who was bored by remarks that were too general and political, brought the discussion back to a more personal level.
Autumn, All the Cats Return Page 14
