Hélène’s eyes searched mine. She was an amazing woman. But she was starting to scare me. Because of what she was capable of getting me to say. Because of what she was capable of doing too.
She didn’t say, “I love you.” What she said was, “Loubet’s right.”
“What else did he say about me?”
“That you’re sensitive. Over sensitive. You’re an incurable romantic, Montale.”
She took her hand away from mine, leaving me with a real feeling of emptiness. There was an abyss between us. Her hand was far from mine now, and it made me feel dizzy. I was about to plunge in. And tell her everything.
No, I’d kill the fucking hitman first.
“Well?” she asked.
Yes, before anything else, I had to kill him.
Empty my hate into his belly.
Sonia.
And all that hate inside me. Hardening inside my body.
“Well what?” I replied, as laconically as I could.
“Are you in trouble with the Mafia?”
“When’s Sonia’s funeral?”
“When I sign the burial certificate.”
“And when are you planning to do that?”
“When you’ve answered my question.”
“No!”
“Yes.”
We looked straight at each other. Violence against violence. Truth against truth. Justice against justice. But I had an advantage over her. The hate I was feeling. For the first time. I didn’t flinch.
“I can’t give you an answer. I have plenty of enemies. In North Marseilles. In the joint. Among the cops. And in the Mafia.”
“A pity, Montale.”
“What is?”
“You know, there are some mistakes so terrible, you can’t even feel remorse.”
“Why should I feel remorse?”
“Maybe it was your fault Sonia died.”
My heart jumped. As if it wanted to escape, to leave my body, to fly away. To go somewhere where there was peace. If such a place existed. Hélène Pessayre had hit me right where it hurt the most. Because that was precisely what I’d been brooding over. Thanks to me, thanks to the fact that she’d been attracted to me the other night, Sonia had ended up at the end of a killer’s knife. I’d only just met her, and they’d killed her to make it clear to me they weren’t joking. The first on their list. In their cold logic, there were degrees of closeness, like the rungs on a ladder. Sonia was at the bottom of the ladder. Honorine right at the top, with Fonfon one rung below her.
I had to find Babette. As quickly as possible. Though I’d have to reason with myself to stop from strangling her as soon as I saw her.
Hélène Pessayre stood up. “She was the same age as me, Montale. I won’t forgive you.”
“For what?”
“For lying to me, if you have.”
I had lied to her. Was I going to keep lying?
She was leaving. Striding to the counter with her coin purse in her hand, to pay for her meal. I’d stood up. Ange was looking at me, without really understanding.
“Hélène.”
She turned. As quickly as a teenager. And for a fraction of a second, I had a glimpse of the young girl she must have been in Algiers. Summer in Algiers. A pretty seagull. Proud. Free. I also had a glimpse of her tanned young body, and the outline of her muscles as she dived into the water of the harbor. And the men looking at her.
The way I was looking at her now. Twenty years later.
I didn’t know what to say. I stood there, looking at her.
“See you around,” I said.
“Maybe,” she said, sadly. “Bye.”
8.
IN WHICH WHAT YOU CAN UNDERSTAND
YOU CAN ALSO FORGIVE
Georges Mavros was waiting for me. He was the only friend I still had. The last one of my generation. Ugo and Manu were dead. The others had gone off to different places. Places where they’d found work. Where they were able to make a go of things. Where they’d met women. Most of them to Paris. Every now and again, one of them would give me a ring. To tell me how he was doing. To tell me he and his family were in town, between trains, or planes, or boats. There’d be time for a quick lunch or dinner. Marseilles was just a place of transit to them now. A stopover. But over the years the calls had become much less frequent. Life swallowed friendship. Some lost their jobs, or their marriages broke up. Not to mention those I’d erased from my memory, and from my address book, because they sympathized with the National Front.
Once you get to a certain age, you don’t make friends anymore. But you still have buddies. People you hang out with, party with, play cards or bowls with. The years passed like that. With them. Between one person’s birthday and another. Evenings spent eating and drinking. Dancing. The children grew up. They’d bring along their gorgeous girlfriends, who’d seduce their fathers and the friends of their friends, playing with their desire, as only girls between fifteen and eighteen can do. The couples would drink and gossip about each other’s infidelities. And you also saw couples falling apart within the space of a single evening.
Mavros lost Pascale during one of those evenings. It was three years ago, the end of summer, at Marie and Pierre’s place. They had a beautiful house in Malmousque, on Rue de la Douane, and they loved having friends over. I was very fond of Marie and Pierre.
Lole and I had been dancing salsa. Juan Luis Guerra, Arturo Sandoval, Irakere, Tito Puente, and to finish, Ray Barretto’s magnificent “Benedicion.” We were out of breath, our bodies fairly aroused after clinging to each other for so long.
Mavros was standing alone, leaning awkwardly against a wall, a glass of champagne in his hand.
“Are you O.K.?” I asked him.
He raised his glass, as if in a toast, and knocked back the drink. “Absolutely fine.”
And he went off to get another drink. He was clearly determined to get plastered. I watched him as he went. Pascale, his girlfriend of five years, was at the other end of the room, deep in conversation with her old friend Joëlle and Benoît, a Marseilles photographer we occasionally met at parties. From time to time, someone would pass, join in their conversation, and walk off again.
I stood there for a moment watching the three of them. Pascale was in profile. She was monopolizing the conversation, talking nineteen to the dozen the way she sometimes did when she was passionate about something, or someone. Benoît had moved closer to her. So close, he seemed to be leaning his shoulder on hers. From time to time, he’d place his hand on the back of a chair, and Pascale would push back her long hair and then bring down her hand so that it rested next to his, but without touching it. It was mutual seduction, that much was obvious. And I wondered if Joëlle realized what was happening right there in front of her eyes.
Mavros was dying to join them, but he stayed where he was, drinking alone. With a kind of desperate determination. At one point, Pascale left Joëlle and Benoît, I assumed to go to the toilet, and walked right past him without saying a word. On the way back, she noticed him at last, went up to him, smiled, and asked, very gently, “Are you all right?”
“I don’t exist anymore, is that it?” he replied.
“Why do you say that?”
“I’ve been watching you for an hour, I’ve been pouring myself drinks right next to you. You haven’t looked at me once. It’s as if I didn’t exist. Is that it?”
Pascale didn’t answer. She turned around and went back to the toilet. To cry. Because it was true. He didn’t exist for her anymore. In her heart. But she hadn’t yet admitted it to herself. Until she heard Mavros come right out with it.
One night a month later, Pascale stayed out all night. Mavros was in Limoges, sorting out the details of a fight he was arranging for one of his protégés. He phoned Pascale almost every hour during the night. He started to get worried. He was afraid s
omething had happened to her—she’d had an accident, she’d been attacked. He kept leaving messages for her. The next day, Pascale left him one: Nothing’s happened to me. I’m not in hospital. I’m all right. I didn’t go home last night. I’m at the office. Call me if you want to.
After Pascale had left, Mavros and I spent a few nights together. Drinking, talking about the past, about life, love, women. Mavros felt wretched, and I couldn’t do anything to help him regain his self-confidence.
Now he was living alone.
“You know, I used to wake up at night sometimes, and there’d be light coming through the shutters, and I’d just lie there for hours watching Pascale sleeping. She’d often be lying on her side, with her face turned to me, and a hand under her cheek. And I’d say to myself, ‘She’s more beautiful than ever. Gentler.’ Her face at night made me happy, Fabio.”
Lole’s face had made me happy, too. I loved the mornings best of all. Waking up. Kissing her on the forehead, stroking her cheek, her neck. Until she stretched out her arm and put her hand on the back of my neck and pulled me to her to kiss me. It was always a good day for love.
“One separation is like another, Georges,” I’d said to him when he’d called me after Lole left. “Everyone suffers. Everyone feels pain.”
Mavros had been the only one to phone me. He was a real friend. That day, I’d made a complete break with all the buddies. And their parties. I should have done it before. Because they’d dropped Mavros. Gradually the invitations had dried up. They all liked Pascal and Benoît. And they all preferred happy relationships. It made life easier for them. It also stopped them from thinking the same thing could happen to them one day.
“Yeah,” he’d replied. “Except that if you love someone else, you have a shoulder to lay your head on, a hand to stroke your cheek, and . . . You see, Fabio, the new desire takes away the pain of the old one.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“I do.”
The pain of Pascale’s leaving was still with him. As Lole’s was with me. But I was trying to find a meaning in what Lole had decided to do. Because it had to have a meaning. Lole hadn’t left me for no reason. By now, I’d finally understood a lot of things, and what I could understand I could forgive.
“How’s about we spar a little?”
The boxing gym hadn’t changed. It was as clean as ever. Only the posters on the walls had turned yellow. But Mavros was attached to his posters. They were a reminder that he’d been a good boxer. And a good trainer. These days, he didn’t arrange matches. He gave lessons. To the neighborhood kids. And the local town council gave him a small grant to keep his gym in good condition. Everyone in the neighborhood agreed it was better to see the kids learning to box than setting fire to cars or smashing store windows.
“You smoke too much, Fabio,” he said. He hit me in the abdominals. “You’re a little flabby here.”
“How about here?” I said, hitting him on the chin.
“Yeah, me too!” He laughed. “Come on, let’s see what you can do.”
Mavros and I had fought over a girl in this ring. We were sixteen. Her name was Ophelia. We were both in love with her. But we were good friends, and we didn’t want to fall out over a girl.
“Whoever wins on points,” he’d suggested. “Three rounds.”
His father, who found the whole thing amusing, agreed to referee. He was the one who’d started the gym, with the help of a sporting and cultural association connected to the CGT.
Mavros was a whole lot better than me. In the third round, he drew me into a corner of the ring, clinging to me, and started hitting me hard. But I was angrier than him. I wanted Ophelia. As he hit me, I caught my breath, freed myself, and got him back into the middle of the ring. There, I managed to land about twenty blows. I could hear him breathing against my shoulder. We were both as strong as each other. My desire for Ophelia compensated for my lack of technique. Just before the bell, I hit him on the nose. Mavros lost his balance and tried to support himself on the ropes. I kept punching, though I was at the point of exhaustion. A few seconds more, and he might have laid me out with a single uppercut.
His father declared me the winner. Mavros and I embraced. But come Friday night, Ophelia decided she wanted to go out with him. Not me.
Mavros had married her. She had just turned twenty. He was twenty-one, with a good career as a middleweight ahead of him. But she had forced him to give up boxing, which she couldn’t stand. He’d become a truck driver, until one day he realized she was cheating on him every time he went out on the road.
Twenty minutes later, I threw in the sponge. I was out of breath, and my arms felt weak. I spat out my mouth guard into my glove and went and sat down on the bench. I was too exhausted to keep my head up straight, and let it drop between my shoulders.
“So, champion, giving up?”
“Go to hell!” I hissed.
He burst out laughing. “Let’s take a shower, and then we’ll go get a cold beer.”
That was exactly what I had in mind. A shower and a beer.
Less than an hour later, we were sitting on the terrace of the Bar des Minimes, on Chemin Saint-Antoine. By the time we were on our second beers, I’d told Mavros everything that had happened. From the time I met Sonia to my lunch with Hélène Pessayre.
“I have to find Babette.”
“Yeah, and what are you going to do then? Have her giftwrapped and hand her over to those guys?”
“I don’t know, Georges. But I have to find her. I need to know just how serious this is. Maybe we can come to some kind of arrangement with them.”
“Are you kidding? You think guys who’d kill a girl just to get you up off your ass are the kind of guys you can talk to?”
The fact was, I didn’t know. I couldn’t think straight. Sonia’s death was elbowing out every other thought in my head. But one thing was for sure: I might have been angry with Babette for triggering this horror, but I couldn’t see myself handing her over to the Mafia. I didn’t want her killed.
“You may be on their list,” I said, jokily.
The possibility had only just crossed my mind, and it sent a shiver down my spine.
“I don’t think so. If they whack too many of the people around you, the cops won’t let you out of their sight. And then you won’t be able to do what these guys are expecting of you.”
That made sense. After all, how could they know Mavros was a friend of mine? I went to his gym to work out, the same way I went to Hassan’s bar to drink. Were they going to kill Hassan, too? No, Mavros was right.
“You’re right,” I said.
His eyes, though, told me it’s easier to say things than to believe them. Not that Mavros was afraid. But there was anxiety in his eyes. It was understandable. We weren’t afraid of death, but we’d have preferred it to strike us later rather than sooner, and if possible in bed, after a good night’s sleep.
“You know, Georges, whatever coaching you’re doing, you could put off till later. Why don’t you take a vacation? It’s a good time for it. A few days chilling out in the mountains . . . A week at the most.”
“I don’t have anywhere to chill out. And I don’t want to. I’ve told you how I see things, Fabio. What if they come after you? Beat you up? I don’t want to be too far from here if that happens. O.K.?”
“O.K. But keep your distance. This is nothing to do with you. Babette is my concern. You hardly know her.”
“I know her well enough. And she’s a friend of yours.”
He looked at me. His eyes had changed. They had turned coal black, but without the brightness of anthracite. There was nothing in them but a great tiredness.
“The way I look at it,” he said, “what have we got to lose? We’ve been screwed all our fucking lives. Our women have dumped us. We never had kids. So what’s left? Friendship.”
“That’s why I don’t want to throw it away. I don’t want to serve it up on a plate to those vultures.”
“O.K., pal,” he said, patting me on the shoulder. “One more drink, and I’ll be on my way. I have a date with a stationmaster’s wife.”
“Really!”
He laughed. This was the Mavros I’d known in my teens. A fighter, big, strong, self-confident. And a ladies’ man.
“No, she works in the post office next door. She’s from Réunion. Her husband walked out on her and her two kids. I play at being daddy in the evening, it keeps me occupied.”
“And later you play with the mommy.”
“Hey,” he said, “we’re not too old for it yet, are we?” He finished his drink. “She doesn’t expect anything from me, and I don’t expect anything from her. But we make the nights less long for each other.”
I got back to my car and put on a Pinetop Perkins cassette. After Hours. To take me back downtown.
Marseilles blues was still my style.
I made a detour along the coast. On those metal bridges the consultant landscape architects of Euroméditerrannée wanted to destroy. In that article in the magazine Marseilles, they called them “a cold, repellent universe of machines, concrete and rivets under the sun.” The idiots!
From here, the harbor looked magnificent. You got a real eyeful of it as you drove. The piers. The freighters. The cranes. The ferries. The sea. The Château d’If and the islands of the Frioul in the distance. All ready for the taking.
9.
IN WHICH WE LEARN THAT
IT’S HARD TO SURVIVE THE DEAD
We were driving fender to fender. A lot of people were hooting their horns. From the Corniche onward, there’d been nothing but long lines of cars in both directions. Everyone in Marseilles seemed to be on the terraces of the ice cream parlors and bars and restaurants along the seafront. At the rate we were going, I’d soon be running out of cassettes. I’d followed Pinetop Perkins with Lightnin’ Hopkins. Darling, Do You Remember Me?
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