Solea

by Jean-Claude Izzo

  I felt a wrench in my stomach. So much love.

  All I could find to say was “Give me another drink.”

  “I’m not being nasty or anything. What Babette does is her business. And you’re big enough to fuck up whichever way you like. I’m not going to dictate to you what you can and can’t do. But if those guys touch a hair on Honorine’s head . . .”

  He didn’t finish the sentence. But his eyes told me what he couldn’t say in words: that he was holding me responsible for whatever happened to Honorine. Just to her.

  “Nothing will happen to her. I swear. Or to you.”

  “Right,” he said, not really convinced.

  But we clinked glasses all the same. For real, this time.

  “I swear,” I repeated.

  “O.K., let’s drop it,” he said.

  “No, let’s not drop it. I’ll call Babette, and then I’ll tell you what she says.”

  Babette agreed. She’d come, and we’d talk. My plan suited her. But, from the tone of her voice, I guessed it wouldn’t be a piece of cake, getting her to give up on publishing her report. We didn’t pursue that for now. The important thing was to talk about it face to face.

  “I have some new information,” Hélène Pessayre said.

  “So have I,” I replied. “You first.”

  “My men have identified one of the guys.”

  “So have I. Ricardo Bruscati.”

  Silence at the other end.

  “Impressed, huh?” I said, amused.

  “Quite impressed.”

  “I used to be a cop, too.”

  I tried to imagine her face at that moment. The look of disappointment on it. I didn’t suppose Hélène Pessayre liked anyone beating her to the draw.

  “Hélène?”

  “Yes, Montale.”

  “Don’t make that face!”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I found out about Ricardo Bruscati by chance. My neighbor, Fonfon, recognized him. He’d seen his photo recently in the newspaper. That’s all I know about him. So go on.”

  She cleared her throat. She was still a little angry. “It doesn’t make our job any easier.”

  “What doesn’t?”

  “The fact that the second man is Bruscati.”

  “Why not? Now we know who we’re dealing with, don’t we?”

  “No. Bruscati is from the Var. He’s not known for slicing people up with knives. He’s a strong-arm man who settles scores. Just that, nothing else.”

  My turn to fall silent. I saw what she was getting at. “There’s another man. Is that what you’re telling me? A real Mafia hitman?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who’s probably having a quiet aperitif on the terrace of the New York as we speak.”

  “Precisely. And the fact that they also hired Bruscati, who isn’t just anybody, shows they mean business.”

  “Was Bruscati mixed up in the murder of Yann Piat?”

  “Not as far as I know. In fact, I very much doubt it. But he was one of the people who broke up Yann Piat’s big meeting at L’Espace 3000 in Fréjus on March 16th 1993. You remember?”

  “Yes. They used tear gas. It was Fargette who gave the orders. Yann Piat didn’t fit in with his political plans.”

  I’d read about it in the papers.

  “Fargette was still backing the UDF candidate,” she went on. “With the approval of the National Front. I think Bruscati’s still working for the National Front behind the scenes, handling security for them between Marseilles and Nice, recruiting people, training them . . . There’s a file on all that on the white disk.”

  I’d skimmed through that file. It didn’t tell me anything I hadn’t gleaned from reading the newspapers. It was more like a summary of the situation in the Var than an explosive document. But I’d lingered for a while over the links between Fargette and the National Front. I remembered part of the transcript of a phone conversation between the Marseilles gang boss Daniel Savastano and Fargette. “There are people who want to work, who want to get the city back on track. I told him, if you have friends who have businesses, that kind of thing, let’s try putting them to work . . .”

  “Did Bruscati kill Fargette?”

  Fargette had been killed the day after the meeting, at his home in Italy.

  “Fargette was killed by four men.”

  “Yes, I know. But . . .”

  “What’s the point of speculating? It’s quite possible that after the murder of Yann Piat, Bruscati killed a whole lot of people. People who stood in their way.”

  “For instance?”

  “For instance, Michel Régnier.”

  I whistled through my teeth. After Fargette’s death, Régnier had been considered the godfather of the South of France. The godfather of the local underworld, not the Mafia. On September 30th 1996—his birthday—he’d been riddled with bullets, with his wife looking on.

  “To me, the fact that Bruscati is here now means one thing, and one thing only: he’s working for the Mafia. And that means the Mafia’s really taken economic control of the region. I think that’s one of the ideas in your friend’s report, and it puts an end to all the speculation about a gangland war.”

  “Economic control, not political control?”

  “I haven’t yet dared to open the black disk.”

  “Right. The less we know . . .” I said again, mechanically.

  “Do you seriously think that?”

  It was as if I was hearing Babette.

  “I don’t think anything, Hélène. All I’m saying is that some people are dead and some are alive. And among the ones who are alive, there are some who were responsible for the others being dead. And most of them are still at large. And still doing business. Yesterday with the Var and Marseilles underworld, today with the Mafia. Do you follow me?”

  She didn’t reply. I heard her light a cigarette. “Any news about your friend Babette Bellini?”

  “I think I’ve finally located her,” I lied, in a confident voice.

  “Well, I’m patient, even if they aren’t. I’ll wait for your call . . . By the way, Montale, I changed the team after you left the Bourse Center. As you were on your way home, we didn’t want to risk being spotted. It’s a white Peugeot 304 now.”

  “Which reminds me,” I said. “I have a favor to ask you.”

  “Go on.”

  “As you have the manpower, I’d like a twenty-four-hour watch to be kept on Honorine’s house and Fonfon’s bar, which is very near.”

  Silence.

  “I’ll have to think about it.”

  “Hélène, I’m not going to blackmail you. ‘I’ll give you this if you give me that’—that’s not my style. But if anything goes wrong . . . I don’t want to have to kiss the corpses of those two, Hélène. I love them more than anything else in my life. They’re the only ones I have left, you understand?”

  I closed my eyes to think about Fonfon and Honorine, and saw Lole’s face. I loved her more than anything else in my life too. She wasn’t my woman anymore. She was living far away, with another man. But like Fonfon and Honorine, she still gave me what no one else could. A sense of what love was.

  “All right,” Hélène Pessayre said. “But not before tomorrow morning.”

  “Thanks.”

  I was about to hang up.

  “Montale.”

  “Yes?”

  “I hope we’ll get this whole mess over with very soon. And that . . . that we’ll come out of it as friends. I mean . . . that you’ll want to invite me to your house, to have dinner with Honorine and Fonfon.”

  “I hope so, Hélène. I really do. It’d give me great pleasure to invite you to my house.”

  “Take care of yourself in the meantime.”

  And she hung up. Too quickly. I
had time to hear the small whistling sound that followed. My phone was being tapped. The bitch! I thought, but I didn’t have time to think anything else, or even to savor her last words, because the phone rang again. And I knew the next voice I heard wouldn’t be anywhere near as disturbing as Hélène Pessayre’s.

  “Any news, Montale?”

  I’d decided to keep things low key. No clever remarks. No wisecracks. I’d toe the line, pretend I was on my knees, a poor idiot at the end of his tether.

  “Yes, I spoke to Babette on the phone.”

  “Good. Is that who you were just talking to?”

  “No, I was just talking to the cops. I can’t get them off my back. Two friends of mine dead, they find that hard to swallow. They’ve been giving me the third degree.”

  “Well, that’s your problem. When did you phone the shit stirrer? When you got away from us this afternoon?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You’re sure she’s not here, in Marseilles?”

  “I’m being straight with you. She can be here in two days.”

  He paused for a moment. “Two days, Montale, that’s all I’m giving you. I have another name on my list. And that pretty captain of yours won’t like it one little bit.”

  “O.K. What do we do when she’s here?”

  “I’ll let you know. And Montale, tell the Bellini woman not to come empty-handed. She has some things of ours that we’d like to get back.”

  “I already mentioned it to her.”

  “Good. You’re making progress.”

  “What about the rest of it? Her report?”

  “We don’t give a fuck about that. She can write whatever she wants, wherever she wants. It’ll be like pissing in the wind. It always is.” He laughed, then his voice again became as sharp as the knife he handled so skillfully. “Two days.”

  They were only interested in the contents of the black disk. The one neither Hélène Pessayre nor I dared look at. In her draft report, Babette had written: The money laundering networks are still in place, and in this region they are controlled by ‘boards of directors’ that bring together influential politicians, businessmen and local representatives of the Mafia. She mentioned a number of “mixed companies” created by the Mafia and run by prominent businessmen.

  “One more thing, Montale. Don’t pull this afternoon’s stunt again. O.K.?”

  “You got it.”

  I let him hang up. There was the same whistling sound. I needed a pastis badly. And a little music. An old Nat King Cole track. “The Lonesome Road,” with Anita O’Day as guest star. Yes, that was what I needed before joining Fonfon and Honorine. We were supposed to be having vegetable farcis. The taste of courgettes, tomatoes and eggplants, I knew, would keep death at bay. This evening more than ever, I needed those two around me.

  16.

  IN WHICH THE GAME IS BEING PLAYED,

  UNWITTINGLY, ON THE DEVIL’S CHESS BOARD

  It was while we were eating that I started to have my doubts.

  The farcis were delicious, of course. Honorine, I had to admit, had a wonderful knack for making sure the meat and vegetables stayed tender. That was what made her farcis so different than the ones you found in restaurants, in which the meat was always a little too crunchy on the outside. Except perhaps at the Sud du Haut, a little restaurant on Cours Julien that still specialized in family-style cooking.

  But as I ate, I couldn’t stop thinking about the situation I was in. For the first time, I had two killers and two cops outside my door. Good and Evil allowed to park in front of my house. A stalemate. With me in the middle. Like the spark that could set off the powder keg. Was that the spark I’d been dreaming of since Lole left? To make my death a last spark? I started sweating. Even if Babette and I managed to avoid getting out throats cut by the hitman, I told myself, we’d still have Bruscati’s bullets to dodge.

  “More?” Honorine asked.

  We were eating inside, because of the mistral. It had dropped a little, but was still blowing quite strongly. According to the news, the fire was spreading all around Marseilles. In one day, nearly five thousand acres of Aleppo pines and scrubland had gone up in smoke. It was a tragedy. Trees that had been planted only twenty-five years ago as part of a reforestation program were gone. Everything would have to be started all over again. People were already talking of a collective trauma. And the debate was in full swing. Should there be a twelve-mile buffer zone of almond trees, olives and vines between the edge of the Etoile massif and the Marseilles area? Yes, but who would pay? In this society, you always had to think of the bottom line. Even in the worst situations, money came first.

  By the time we got to the cheese, we were running low on wine and Fonfon suggested going to his bar to get some.

  “I’ll go,” I said.

  Something wasn’t right, and I wanted to make sure. Even if the answer turned out to be something I didn’t like. I found it hard to believe that Hélène Pessayre had had my phone tapped. Of course, I knew she was capable of it, but it didn’t fit in with what she’d said before she hung up. About our being friends when it was over. Above all, a professional like her would never have hung up first.

  In Fonfon’s bar, I dialed Hélène Pessayre’s cellphone.

  “Yes?” she said.

  Music in the background. An Italian singer.

  un po’ di là del mare c’è una terra chiara

  che di confini e argini non sa

  “Montale here. I hope I’m not disturbing you?”

  un po’ di là del mare c’è una terra chiara

  “I’m just out of the shower.”

  Instantly, images—carnal, sensual images—unreeled in front of my eyes. For the first time, I caught myself thinking of Hélène Pessayre with desire. I wasn’t immune to her charms, of course—far from it—but our relationship was so complex, so tense at times, there was no room for feelings. At least, that’s what I’d thought. Until now. My cock was responding to these fleeting images. I smiled. It was a pleasure to know I could still get a hard-on at the thought of a woman’s body.

  “Montale?”

  I’ve never been a voyeur, but I used to love it when I caught Lole coming out of the shower, taking a towel, and wrapping herself in it, leaving only her wet legs and shoulders bare. As soon as I heard the water stop running, I always found something to do in the bathroom. I’d wait until she lifted her hair onto the back of her neck and then go to her. I think that was when I desired her the most, no matter what time it was. I loved her smile, when our eyes met in the mirror. And the shudder that went through her when I kissed her neck. Lole.

  un po’ di là del mare c’è una terra sincera

  “Yes,” I said, trying to get my thoughts—and my cock—under control. “I have a question to ask you.”

  “It had better be important,” she replied, with a laugh. “Seeing what time it is.”

  She turned down the volume.

  “This is serious, Hélène. Did you have my phone tapped?”

  “What?”

  I had my answer. It wasn’t her.

  “Hélène, my phone is being tapped.”

  “Since when?”

  A shudder went down my spine. I hadn’t even thought about that. Since when? If it was since this morning, then Babette, Bruno and his family were in danger.

  “I don’t know. I didn’t realize until tonight, after you called.”

  After I’d called Babette, who’d hung up first, her or me? I couldn’t remember. But I had to. The second time, it was me. The first time . . . The first time, it was her. “Go to hell!” she’d said. No, there hadn’t been that characteristic whistling sound afterwards. I was sure of it. But could I be sure of myself? Really sure? No. I had to call Le Castellas. Immediately.

  “Did you phone your friend Babette Bellini from your house tonight?”

/>   “No. This morning. Hélène, who’s behind these phone taps?”

  “You didn’t tell me you knew where she was.”

  The woman was implacable. Even naked and wrapped in a bath towel.

  “I told you I’d located her.”

  “And where is she?”

  “In the Cévennes. I’m trying to persuade her to come to Marseilles. Shit, Hélène, this is serious!” I’d raised my voice.

  “Stop getting worked up when you’re caught out, Montale! We could have gotten up there in three hours!”

  “So there would have been what?” I cried. “A procession of cars? Yes, of course! You, me, the killers, other cops, other killers . . . One following the other, like after I left Mavros’s gym this afternoon!”

  She didn’t reply.

  “Hélène,” I said, more calmly, “it’s not that I don’t trust you. But you can’t be sure of anything or anyone. Your superiors. The cops in your team. The proof of it is—”

  “But this is me, dammit, this is me!” She was the one yelling now. “You could have told me, couldn’t you?”

  I closed my eyes. The images in my head weren’t of Hélène Pessayre coming out of the shower anymore, but of the captain who’d given me a slap this morning.

  I wasn’t getting anywhere, she was right.

  “You haven’t answered my question. Who among your people could have done it?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, calmer now. “I don’t know.”

  There was a heavy silence.

  “Who’s the singer I heard?” I asked, to relieve the tension.

  “Gianmaria Testa,” she replied wearily. “Good, isn’t he?” Then, quite resolutely, “Montale, I’m coming over.”

  “People will talk,” I said as a joke.

  “Would you prefer it if I summoned you to Headquarters?”

  I put down two liters of red wine from the estate of Villeneuve Flayosc, in Roquefort-la-Bédoule. A wine a Breton friend named Michel had introduced us to the previous winter. Château-les-mûres. Really delicious.

  “He was nearly dying of thirst,” Honorine said.