Solea (11 page)

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.

W
e 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?

Things were starting to stir in my head. Memories. For months now, my thoughts had been slipping away from me. I found it hard to focus on any one thing, even fishing—and that really was serious. The more time passed, the more important Lole's absence came to seem. It dominated my life. I was living in the void she had left behind. The worst part of it was going home. Being alone in the house. For the first time in my life.

I should have changed the music. Gotten rid of these grim thoughts with something Cuban. Guillermo Portabales. Francisco Repilado. Or better still, the Buena Vista Social Club. I should have. My life was full of should haves. Great, I thought, tooting my horn at the driver in front of me. He was calmly getting his family out of the car, along with everything they needed for a picnic on the beach. The icebox, the chairs, the folding table. All they needed was a TV set, I thought. My mood wasn't improving.

Coming level with the Café du Port, at the Pointe-Rouge—it had taken forty minutes to get that far—I felt like a drink. One or two. Maybe even three. But then I thought of Fonfon and Honorine waiting for me on the terrace. I wasn't really alone. They were both there. With their love for me. Their patience. This morning, after the call from Hélène Pessayre, I'd left without saying hello.

“Who is it you want to kill?” Honorine had asked me last night.

“Forget it, Honorine. There are thousands of people I'd like to kill.”

“Sure, but there seems to be one you've really set your heart on.”

“Honestly, forget it. It's the heat. I'm on edge. Go back to sleep.”

“Make yourself a camomile tea. It'll relax you. Fonfon had one.”

I'd lowered my head. I didn't want to see the questions in her eyes. Or how afraid she was that I was getting involved in something I shouldn't. I still had a vivid memory of the way she'd looked at me four years ago when I'd told her that Ugo was dead. I didn't want to see that look again. Not for anything in the world. Especially not now.

Honorine knew I didn't have blood on my hands. She knew I'd never been able to bring myself to kill a man in cold blood. I'd let the cops handle Batisti. Narni had crashed his car at the bottom of a ravine on the Gineste pass. There was only Saadna. I'd let him burn, and hadn't felt any remorse. But I couldn't have killed even that loathsome piece of shit, just like that. She knew that. I'd told her all about it.

I wasn't the same man now. And Honorine knew that, too. There was too much repressed rage in me, too many scores I hadn't settled. And too much despair. I wasn't bitter, but I was weary. Tired. Tired of people, tired of the world. I couldn't get Sonia's unjust, stupid, cruel death out of my head. Her death made all other deaths unbearable. Including all the anonymous ones I read about every day in the newspapers. Thousands. Hundreds of thousands. Ever since Bosnia. Rwanda. Now Algeria and its daily massacres. A hundred men, women and children slaughtered every night, their throats cut. Disgust.

Enough to make you throw up.

Sonia.

I didn't know what her killer looked like. I imagined a skull. Like on the skull and crossbones, which I saw being hoisted some nights in my head. Floating free, still unpunished. I wanted to have done with it. At least once. Once and for all.

Sonia.

Shit! I'd promised myself I'd go see her father and her son. That was what I should be doing this evening, not drinking. Seeing him and little Enzo. And telling them I thought I would have loved Sonia.

I put on the left indicator light, pulled out, and edged my car into the opposite lane. Immediately, people started hooting their horns. But I didn't give a damn. Nobody really gave a damn. They hooted for the hell of it. They screamed too, also for the hell of it.

“Where are you going, shithead?”

“To see your sister!”

After reversing twice, I managed to join the line, but I immediately turned left because I didn't want to get into any more jams. I zigzagged through a maze of side streets until I came out onto Avenue des Goumiers. The traffic was lighter here. I was on my way to La Capelette, a neighborhood that had been a magnet for Italian families, mainly from the North, ever since the twenties.

Sonia's father, Attilio, lived on Rue Antoine Del Bello, on the corner of Rue Fifi Turin. Two streets named for Italian resistance fighters who'd died for France. For freedom. For an idea of mankind that had nothing to do with the strutting of a Hitler or a Mussolini. Del Bello, who'd grown up in State custody in Italy, wasn't even French when he died in the maquis.

Attilio De Luca opened the door. I recognized him. Hassan was right. De Luca and I had met in his bar and had a few aperitifs together. He'd lost his job in 1992, after fifteen years as a timekeeper at Intramar. He'd been working on the waterfront for thirty-five years. He had told me a little about his life. How proud he'd been to be a longshoreman. The strikes he'd taken part in. Until the year the oldest of the longshoremen were shown the door. The employers were modernizing the workforce. Not only the oldest had to go, but the troublemakers too. De Luca was on the red list. The workers who were considered “inflexible.” And because of his age, he was among the first to be thrown out on the streets.

De Luca had been born on Rue Antoine Del Bello. A street where everyone's name ended in
i
or
a
before people called Alvarez, Gutierrez or Domenech started arriving.

“When I was born, out of a thousand people on that street, there were nine hundred and ninety-four Italians, two Spaniards and an Armenian.”

His childhood memories were strangely similar to mine, and made me feel happy thinking about them.

“In summer, there'd be chairs set out all along the sidewalk. Everyone had their little story to tell.”

Dammit, I thought, why didn't he ever tell me about his daughter? Why didn't he ever bring her to Hassan's? Why did I see Sonia only once and then lose her forever? The terrible thing was that with Sonia, there were no regrets—the way there were with Lole—there was only remorse. The worst kind of remorse. Thinking I'd unwittingly brought about her death.

“Oh,” De Luca said. “Montale.”

He'd aged a hundred years.

“I heard about Sonia.”

He looked up at me, and I saw how red his eyes were. They were also full of questions. Obviously, he didn't understand what I was doing here. You might feel close to someone over a
pastis
at Hassan's, but that didn't make you part of the family.

At the mention of Sonia's name, Enzo appeared. He only came up to his grandfather's waist. He clung to him and looked up at me. He had his mother's gray-blue eyes.

“I . . .”

“Come in, come in . . . Enzo, go back to bed! It's nearly ten o'clock . . . Kids never want to sleep,” he said to me in a flat voice.

The room was quite large, but cluttered with furniture. Every surface was covered in trinkets, and family photos in frames. Just as his wife had left it, ten years ago, when she'd walked out on De Luca. Just as he hoped she'd find it when she returned. “She'll be back one day,” he'd told me, full of hope.

“Sit down. Would you like a drink?”

“I'll have a
pastis
. In a large glass. I'm thirsty.”

“Fucking heat,” he said.

There wasn't much of an age difference between us. Maybe seven or eight years. I could almost have had a child Sonia's age. A girl. A boy. The thought of it made me uncomfortable.

He came back with two glasses, some ice cubes, and a big jug of water. Then he got the bottle out of a sideboard.

“Was it you she was supposed to be meeting last night?” he asked as he poured my drink.

“Yes.”

“When I saw you at the door, I understood.”

Seven or eight years' difference. The same generation, or almost. The generation that grew up after the war. That made sacrifices, that scrimped and saved. Pasta for lunch and dinner. And bread. Open bread, with tomato and olive oil. Bread and broccoli. Bread and eggplant. The generation that had plenty of dreams—dreams that, for our fathers, had worn the genial smile of Joseph Stalin. De Luca had joined the Communist Youth Movement at the age of fifteen.