Solea

by Jean-Claude Izzo

  The judges, Babette wrote, expressed their anger at the fact that legal cooperation is either non-existent or is hampered by politicians, that it costs a criminal organization only 200,000 dollars to launder 20 million, and that drug money (1,500 billion francs every year) circulates freely around the world, with 90% of it being reinvested in the Western economies.

  Babette reported Bernard Bertossa, public prosecutor of Geneva, as saying, “It is time to create a Europe governed by the rule of law, in which we have not only the free circulation of criminals and their funds but also the free circulation of evidence.”

  But the judges know that, however much they raise the alarm, their efforts are stymied by the schizophrenic attitudes of European governments. “We have to do away with tax havens, which only exist to launder dirty money! We cannot make rules and at the same time provide the means for criminals to get around them!” That is the opinion of Judge Baltazar Garzon Real, who knows that every time a trail leads him to Gibraltar, Andorra, or Monaco, it hits a dead end. “All they have to do these days is set up fake Panamanian companies,” says Renaud van Ruymbecke. “The more of these buffer companies there are, the less we can do, even though we know full well that drug money is involved.”

  Night was falling, but it wasn’t getting any cooler. I was sick to the teeth of reading and waiting. At this rate, I’d be plastered again by the time I saw Sonia. If she finally deigned to answer.

  Fifteen minutes later, I tried again. Still nothing.

  I called Hassan.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked.

  In the background, Léo Ferré was singing:

  When the machine has started to hum

  When you don’t really know where you are

  And you wait for whatever will come . . .

  “Feeling fine. Why shouldn’t I be?”

  “Seeing the state you were in last night.”

  “Did I make a fool of myself?”

  “Never seen anyone who could knock them back and stay calm the way you can.”

  “You’re a good man, Hassan!”

  And you wait for whatever will come . . .

  “Nice girl, that Sonia.”

  Even Hassan was getting in on the act.

  “Right,” I said. “Talking of Sonia, any idea where she lives?”

  “Let me see . . .” he said, taking a swig of something. “Rue Consolat. 24 or 26, I’m not sure. But it’s an even number, that I can tell you. I can never remember odd numbers.” He laughed, and took another swig.

  “What are you on right now?” I asked, out of curiosity.

  “Beer.”

  “Me, too. What’s her surname?”

  “De Luca.”

  An Italian. Shit. It had been ages. Since Babette, I’d avoided Italian women.

  “You met her father here a couple of times. Used to be a longshoreman. Attilio. Know the one I mean? Not very tall. Bald.”

  “Yes, of course. He’s her father?”

  “Yup.” Another swig. “So if I see this Sonia, I’ll tell her you’re making inquiries about her, shall I?”

  He laughed again. I didn’t know what time he’d started, but he was on good form.

  “Sure. See you one of these nights. Ciao.”

  Sonia lived at No. 28.

  I rang the bell at the entrance. The door opened. My heart started pounding. On the letter box, it said 1st floor. I climbed the stairs, four steps at a time. I knocked a couple of times. The door opened. And closed behind me.

  Two men stood there looking at me. One of them showed me his badge.

  “Police. Who are you?”

  “What are you doing here?”

  My heart was pounding again. For a different reason this time. I imagined the worst. Of course, I thought, as soon as you turn your head away, even if it’s only for a moment, life gets ready to play its dirty tricks on you. Layer upon layer. Like a napoleon. A layer of cream, a layer of broken pastry. Broken life. Fuck. No, I couldn’t imagine the worst. But I could guess what it was. My heart stopped beating. The smell of death had come back. Not the one that had been floating around in my head, that I’d thought I could feel on me. No, the real smell of death. The smell of blood, too. They often go together.

  “I asked you a question.”

  “Montale. Fabio Montale. I was supposed to meeting Sonia.” It was only half a lie.

  “I’m going downstairs, Alain,” the other cop said. He looked white.

  “O.K., Bernard. They’ll be here soon.”

  “What’s going on?” I said, to put my mind at rest.

  “You’re her . . .” He looked me up and down. Trying to guess my age, and Sonia’s. A good twenty years’ difference, he must have concluded. “Her friend?”

  “Yes. A friend.”

  “Montale, you said?” He seemed to be thinking about something. Then he looked at me again.

  “Yes. Fabio Montale.”

  “She’s dead. Murdered.”

  I felt a knot in my stomach, a hard, heavy lump forming in the pit of my stomach and starting to move up and down my body. Moving all the way up to my throat. Choking me. Leaving me speechless. Without anything to say. As if all words had gone back to prehistory. Back to the caves, from which mankind should never have emerged. In the beginning was the worst. The primal scream of the first man. A scream of despair, beneath the starry vault. Despair at realizing that one day, in spite of all that beauty, one day, he would kill his brother. In the beginning were all the reasons to kill. Even before there were names for them. Envy, jealousy. Desire, fear. Money. Power. Hate. Hate toward others. Hate toward the world.

  Hate.

  I wanted to cry out. To scream.

  Sonia.

  Hate. The lump stopped rising and falling. The blood drained from my veins and gathered in that lump, heavy now in my stomach. An icy cold overcame me. Hate. I’d have to live with the cold, and the hate. Sonia.

  “Sonia,” I murmured.

  “Are you all right?” the cop asked.

  “No.”

  “Sit down.”

  I sat down. In an armchair I didn’t know. In an apartment I didn’t know. The apartment of a woman I didn’t know. A woman who was dead. Murdered. Sonia.

  “How?” I asked.

  The cop offered me a cigarette.

  “Thanks,” I said, and lit it.

  “Her throat was cut. In the shower.”

  “A sex maniac?”

  He shrugged. That meant no. Or at least maybe not. If she’d been raped, he’d have said raped and murdered. He’d only said murdered.

  “I used to be a cop, too. A long time ago.”

  “Montale . . . I thought so . . . North Marseilles, right?” He held out his hand. “I’m Béraud. Alain Béraud. You didn’t have many friends . . .”

  “I know. Only one. Loubet.”

  “Loubet. Yeah . . . He was transferred. Six months ago.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Saint-Brieuc, in Brittany. Not exactly a promotion.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “He didn’t have many friends, either.”

  We heard a police siren. The team was arriving. They’d be searching for fingerprints. Photographing the crime scene. The body. Analyzing. Questioning. Taking statements. All routine. Just one more crime.

  “How about you?”

  “I worked for him. For six months. It was O.K. He was a straight guy.”

  Outside, the siren was still screaming. The police van probably couldn’t find a parking space. Rue Consolat was a narrow street, and everyone parked wherever they liked, however they liked.

  It was doing me good to talk. It was a way of keeping at bay the images of Sonia with her throat cut that were starting to flood into my head. A flood I couldn’t control. Like those
sleepless nights, when you keep playing over and over, like a movie in your head, images of the woman you love in another man’s arms, kissing him, smiling at him, reaching orgasm, whispering, it’s good, yes, it’s so good. It’s the same face. The same spasms of pleasure. The same sighs. The same words. Only another man’s lips. Another man’s hands. Another man’s cock.

  Lola was gone.

  And Sonia was dead. Murdered.

  The gaping wound, with thick, clotted blood oozing out over her breast, her stomach, forming a little pool in her navel, then oozing down between her thighs and over her cunt. The images were there, as horrible as they always were. And the water from the shower washing the blood into the city’s sewers . . .

  Sonia. Why?

  Why was I always on the side of life where everything was cold and tragic? Was there a reason for it? Or was it just chance? Was it because I didn’t love life enough?

  “Montale?”

  The questions were mounting up. And with them, all the images of corpses I’d stored in my head since the days when I was a cop. Hundreds of corpses of strangers. And the others. The people I loved. Manu, Ugo. Guitou, so young. And Leila. Leila, so wonderfully beautiful. I’d never been there to prevent their deaths.

  Always too late, Montale. Late for death. Late for life, too. For friendship. For love.

  Out of sync, lost. Always.

  And now Sonia.

  “Montale?”

  And hate.

  “Yes,” I said.

  I’d take the boat out. I’d head for the open sea. In the darkness. To ask questions of the silence. And spit at the stars, as the first man must have done, coming home one night after a day’s hunting to find his wife with her throat cut.

  “We have to take your statement.”

  “Yes,” I said. “How . . . How did you find out?”

  “The daycare center.”

  “What daycare center?”

  I took out my cigarettes and offered one to Béraud. He refused. He pulled a chair over and sat down facing me. His tone was less friendly now.

  “She has a son. Enzo. He’s eight years old. Didn’t you know?”

  “I only met her last night.”

  “Where?”

  “In a bar. Les Maraîchers. I’m a regular there. So was she, apparently. But we never met till last night.”

  He was giving me the once-over. I knew what was going through his head. I knew the way a cop’s mind worked like the back of my hand. A good cop’s anyway. We’d had a few drinks, Sonia and I. We’d fucked. And then she’d sobered up, and decided to call it quits. It had been a mistake. She couldn’t understand how it had happened. But it was the kind of thing that could happen to a single mother. A fatal mistake. Not uncommon. A mistake often made. Leading to a crime. And the fact that I was an ex-cop made no difference. You could still go crazy. You could still turn violent.

  Unconsciously I suppose, I held out my hands towards him. “Nothing happened between us,” I said. “Nothing at all. We were supposed to meet tonight, that’s all.”

  “I’m not accusing you.”

  “I just wanted you to know.”

  Now it was my turn to give him the once-over. Béraud. A straight cop. Who’d liked working with a captain who was also straight.

  “So the daycare center called you, is that it?”

  “No. They started to get worried. She was always on time. Never late. So they called the boy’s grandfather and . . .”

  Attilio, I thought. Béraud paused. For me to take in what he was telling me. The grandfather, not the father. Clearly, he trusted me again.

  “Not the father?” I said.

  He shrugged. “They’ve never seen the father . . . The grandfather was upset. He’d already kept the boy last night, and was supposed to be keeping him tonight.”

  Béraud paused. And in that silence I thought of tonight, the night Sonia and I should have been spending together.

  “She was supposed to feed him, give him his bath.” He looked at me almost tenderly.

  “So what happened?”

  “He went to the daycare center to get the boy and take him home. Then he tried to contact his daughter at her office. But she’d left. At the same time as usual. So he called here. He thought that with it being as hot as it was, Sonia might have come home first to take a shower and . . . But there was no answer. That’s when he started to get worried, and phoned her neighbor. Sonia and this neighbor often did favors for each other. When she came to the door, she found it half open. She was the one who called us.”

  The apartment filled with noise, voices.

  Béraud stood up. “Hello, captain,” he said.

  I looked up. A tall young woman was standing there in front of me. In jeans and T-shirt, both black. An attractive woman. I extricated myself as best I could from the armchair I was sitting in.

  “Is this the witness?” she asked.

  “He used to be a cop. Fabio Montale.”

  She held out her hand. “Captain Pessayre.”

  She had a firm handshake. Her hand felt warm. Sharp black eyes, full of life and passion. For a fraction of a second, we stood looking at each other. Long enough to believe that the law could abolish death. And crime.

  “Tell me all about it.”

  “I’m tired,” I said, sitting down again. “Tired.”

  And my eyes filled with tears. At last.

  Tears are the only cure for hate.

  5.

  IN WHICH EVEN SOMETHING POINTLESS

  CAN BE GOOD TO SAY, AND GOOD TO HEAR

  I hadn’t spat at the stars. I couldn’t.

  Off the Riou Islands, I’d cut the motor and let the boat drift. It was here, more or less, that my father had held me under the armpits and dipped me in the sea for the first time. I was eight. The same age as Enzo. “Don’t be afraid,” he’d said. “Don’t be afraid.” It was the only baptism I’d ever had. And whenever life became too painful, this was where I came, here, between the sea and the sky. As if it was only here that I might be able to make peace with the world.

  I’d come here when Lole left, too. I’d come to this spot and stayed here the whole night. One whole night running through all the things I blamed myself for. It had needed to be said. At least once. Even if it was just to the empty sky. It was December 16th. The cold chilled me to the bone. Even though I kept knocking back Lagavulin as I wept. Getting back home at dawn, I’d felt as if I was returning to the land of the dead.

  I was alone now. In the silence. Wrapped in garlands of stars. Stars up above me in the blue-black sky, and below me, reflected on the surface of the sea. The only movement was the lapping of the water against my boat.

  I stayed there for a long time, motionless, with my eyes closed. Until I felt the lump inside me, that mixture of disgust and sadness, start to dissolve. The cool air restored a human rhythm to my breathing. Liberating it from the anguish of living and dying.

  Sonia.

  “She’s dead,” I’d told them. “Murdered.”

  Fonfon and Honorine had been playing rummy on the terrace. Honorine’s favourite card game. She always won, because she liked winning. Fonfon always let her win, because he liked to see her joy when she won. Fonfon had a pastis in front of him, Honorine what was left of her Martini. They’d looked up at me. Surprised to see me back so early. Worried, of course. And all I’d said was, “She’s dead. Murdered.”

  I’d looked at them, then, a blanket and my jacket under my arm, and a bottle of Lagavulin in the other hand, I’d crossed the terrace, gone down the steps to the boat and set off into the darkness. Telling myself, as I always did, that this sea, which my father had offered me as a kingdom, would never belong to me, because I always used it to offload all the dirty tricks the world had played on me.

  When I opened my eyes and saw the stars glimmerin
g, I knew, once again, that this wasn’t true. It was as if the world had stopped moving. Life was suspended. Except in my heart, where right now someone was crying. An eight-year-old boy and his grandfather.

  I took a long swig of Lagavulin. Sonia’s laughter, and then her voice, echoed in my head. Everything fell back into place. Clearly. Her laughter. Her voice. And her words.

  “There’s a place they call the Eremo dannunziano. It’s a belvedere where Gabriele d’Annunzio often stayed . . .”

  She’d started talking about Italy. About the Abruzzi, where her family came from. The stretch of coast between Ortona and Vasto which, according to her, “was unique in the world.” Once she started she couldn’t stop, and I’d listened, letting her pleasure flow into me as gladly as the glasses of pastis I was knocking back without a thought.

  “The beach where I spent my summers when I was a kid is called Turchino. Turchino, because the water is turquoise. It’s full of shingle and bamboo. You can make little junks out of the leaves, or fishing rods . . .”

  I could see it all. And feel it. The water flowing over my skin. The gentleness of it. And the saltiness. The salty taste of bodies. Yes, I could see it all, so close I could touch it. Like Sonia’s bare shoulder. As round, and as soft to the touch, as a pebble washed smooth by the sea. Sonia.

  “There’s a railway line all the way down to Foggia . . .”

  She gazed fondly into my eyes. As if inviting me to take that train with her, and glide down to the sea. To Turchino.

  “Life’s so simple down there, Fabio. The rhythm of the train passing, the sound of the sea, pizza al taglio for lunch, and”—she added with a laugh—“una gerla alla stracciatella per me toward evening . . .”