Solea (2 page)

This is what Mediterranean Noir means: to tell stories with a wide swath; to recount great transformations; to denounce but at the same time to propose the culture of solidarity as an alternative.

 

 

 

1
The party was founded in 1972 by Jean-Marie Le Pen and is currently led by Marine Le Pen. It is generally considered to be of the far right, although its leaders deny this qualification.

2
Neo-polar: the 1970s-80s version of the French mystery novel, after the rebirth of the genre following May '68. Often a politically-oriented novel with a social message.

3
Babette Bellini: a character in the Marseilles Trilogy. Journalist and activist, friend of Fabio Montale.

For Thomas,
when he's big

It needs to be said one more time. This is a novel. Nothing of what you are about to read actually happened. But as I can't ignore what I read every day in the newspapers, it's inevitable that my story draws on real life. Because that's where everything is being decided—in real life. And in real life, the horror is greater—far greater—than anything that can possibly be invented. As for Marseilles, my city, always halfway between tragedy and light, it naturally reflects the threat hanging over us.

But something told me it was normal,
that there are certain moments in your life
when you have to do that—kiss corpses.
P
ATRICIA
M
ELO

H
er life was there, in Marseilles. There, beyond the mountains flaming red in this evening's sunset. It'll be windy tomorrow, Babette thought.

In the two weeks she'd spent in this village in the Cévennes, Le Castellas, she'd climbed up onto the ridge at the end of every day. Along the same path where Bruno led his goats.

The morning she'd arrived, she'd thought, Nothing changes here. Everything dies and is reborn. Even if there are more villages dying than being reborn. At some point, a man reinvents the old actions. And everything starts over. The overgrown paths again have a reason to exist.

“It's because the mountain remembers,” Bruno had said, serving her a big bowl of black coffee.

 

She'd met Bruno in 1988. The first big assignment the newspaper had given her. Twenty years after May 1968, what had become of the militants?

As a young philosopher and anarchist, Bruno had fought on the barricades in Paris.
Run, comrade, the old world is after you
. That had been his only slogan. He'd run, throwing paving stones and Molotov cocktails at the riot police. He'd run with the tear gas exploding around him and the riot police at his heels. He'd run everywhere, through May and June, trying to keep one step ahead of the old world's happiness, the old world's dreams, the old world's morality. The old world's stupidity and corruption.

When the unions signed the Grenelle accords, and the workers went back to their factories and the students back to their faculties, Bruno realized he hadn't run fast enough. Nor had anyone in his generation. The old world had caught up with them. Money was the only dream now, the only morality. The only happiness left in life. The old world was making a new era for itself, an era of human misery.

That was how Bruno had told it to Babette. He talks like Rimbaud, she had thought, touched by his words, and attracted to this handsome forty-year-old man.

He and many others had left Paris. Heading for Ariège, the Ardèche, the Cévennes. Looking for abandoned villages.
Lo Païs
, they liked to call it. Another kind of revolution was emerging from the ruins of their illusions. A revolution based on nature and brotherhood. A sense of community. They were inventing a new country for themselves. A wilder, untamed France. Many left again after one or two years. Others persevered for five or six years. Bruno had stayed in this village he had revived. Alone, with his flock of goats.

That night, after the interview, Babette had slept with Bruno.

He'd asked her to stay.

But she couldn't. This wasn't her life.

Over the years, she had often been back to see him. Every time she was in or near the area. Bruno had a partner now, two children, electricity, a TV set and a computer, and he produced goat's cheese and honey.

“If you're ever in any trouble,” he'd said to Babette, “come here. Don't hesitate. From up here all the way down to the valley, everyone's a friend of mine.”

 

This evening, she was missing Marseilles a lot. But she didn't know when she could go back. Or even if she could go back. If she did, nothing, absolutely nothing could ever be the same. She wasn't just in trouble, it was worse than that. The horror of it was in her head all the time. As soon as she closed her eyes, she saw Gianni's corpse. And behind his corpse, those of Francesco and Beppe, which she hadn't seen but could imagine. Tortured, mutilated bodies. Surrounded by pools of black, congealed blood. Other corpses, too. Behind her. But mostly ahead of her. That was inevitable.

When she'd left Rome, frantic, scared to death, she hadn't known where to go. She needed somewhere safe. She needed to think it all through, as calmly as she could. To sort through her papers, put them in order, classify the information, check it all. Put the finishing touches to the biggest piece of investigative journalism she'd ever done. On the Mafia in France, and in the South. No one had ever dug that deep. Too deep, she realized now. She'd remembered what Bruno had said.

“I'm in trouble. Big trouble.”

She'd called him from a phone booth in La Spezia. It was almost one o'clock in the morning. She'd woken him up. He was an early riser, because of the animals. Babette was shaking. Two hours earlier, after driving from Orvieto without stopping, almost like a madwoman, she'd reached Manarola. A town in the Cinque Terre, perched on a rock, where an old friend of Gianni's named Beppe lived. She'd dialed his number, as he'd asked her to. But be careful, he'd said that very morning.

“
Pronto.
”

Babette had hung up. It wasn't Beppe's voice. Then she'd seen the carabinieri arrive in two cars that drew up on the main street. She knew immediately what had happened: the killers had gotten there before her.

She had turned around and gone back the way she had come, along a narrow, twisting mountain road. Hands tight on the wheel, exhausted, but keeping her eyes open for any cars about to overtake her or coming toward her.

“Come,” Bruno had said.

She'd found a seedy room in the Hotel Firenze e Continentale, near the station. She hadn't slept a wink all night. The trains. The presence of death. It all kept coming back to her, down to the smallest detail. A taxi had dropped her on Campo de' Fiori. Gianni had just come back from Palermo. He was waiting for her in his apartment. Ten days is a long time, he'd said on the phone. It had been a long time for her, too. She didn't know if she loved Gianni, but her whole body yearned for him.

“Gianni! Gianni!”

The door was open, but that hadn't worried her.

“Gianni!”

He was there. Tied to a chair. Naked. Dead. She closed her eyes, but too late. She knew she would have to live with that image.

When she'd opened her eyes again, she'd seen the burn marks on his chest, stomach and thighs. No, she didn't want to look. She turned her eyes away from Gianni's mutilated cock. She started screaming. She saw herself screaming, her body frozen rigid, her arms dangling, her mouth wide open. Her screams swelled with the smell of blood, shit and piss that filled the room. When she couldn't breathe anymore, she threw up. At Gianni's feet. Where someone had written in chalk on the wooden floor:
Present for Mademoiselle Bellini. See you later.

Gianni's older brother Francesco was murdered the morning she left Orvieto. Beppe before she arrived in Manarola.

From now on, she was a hunted woman.

 

Bruno had been waiting for her at the bus stop in Saint-Jean-du-Gard. This was how she'd gotten there: train from La Spezia to Ventimiglia, rental car through the little border post at Menton, another train to Nîmes, then a bus. Just to be on the safe side. She didn't really think they were following her. They'd be waiting for her in her apartment in Marseilles. That was the logical thing to do. And everything the Mafia did had its own implacable logic. She'd seen plenty of evidence of that over the past two years.

Just before they got to Le Castellas, at a point where the road overhangs the valley, Bruno had stopped his old jeep.

“Come on, let's go for walk.”

They'd walked to the cliff edge. You could just about see Le Castellas, about two miles farther up, at the end of a dirt track. It was as far as you could go.

“You're safe here. If anyone comes up, Michel, the park ranger, calls me. And if someone was coming along the ridge, Daniel would tell me. We're still the same, I call four times a day, he calls four times a day. If one of us doesn't call when he's supposed to, it means something's wrong. When Daniel's tractor overturned, that was how I found out.”

Babette had looked at him, unable to say a word. Not even thank you.

“And don't feel you're obliged to tell me what kind of trouble you're in.”

Bruno had taken her in his arms, and she had started crying.

 

Babette shivered. The sun had gone down, and the mountains stood out purple against the sky. She carefully stubbed out her cigarette butt with her foot, stood up, and walked down towards Le Castellas. Soothed by the daily miracle of sunset.

In her room, she read over the long letter she'd written to Fabio. In it, she'd told him everything that had happened since she'd arrived in Rome two years earlier. Including how it had ended. How desperate she was. But also how determined. She'd see it through to the end. She'd publish the results of her investigation. In a newspaper, or as a book.
Everything has to come out into the open
, she'd written.

She was still thinking of that beautiful sunset, and wanted to end the letter with it. She wanted to tell Fabio that, in spite of everything, the sun was more beautiful over the sea, no, not more beautiful but more real, no, that wasn't it either, what she wanted was to be with him in his boat, off Riou, watching the sun melt into the sea.

She tore up the letter. She took a new sheet of paper and wrote
I still love you
. Beneath it, she wrote
Take good care of this for me
, put five computer disks in a padded envelope, sealed it and stood up. It was time for dinner with Bruno and his family.

L
ife stank of death.

That's what I'd been thinking last night, walking into Hassan's bar, the Maraîchers. It wasn't just one of those vague ideas you get in your head sometimes. No, I really felt death around me. The rotten putrid smell of it. I'd sniffed my arm, and the smell disgusted me. It was the same smell. I also stank of death. “Take it easy, Fabio,” I'd told myself. “Go home, take a shower, calm down, take the boat out. A nice cool sea breeze and everything will be fine, you'll see.”

The fact is, it was hot. In the upper eighties. The air was a viscous mixture of humidity and pollution. Marseilles was stifling. Easy to work up a thirst. So instead of going straight home through the Vieux-Port and along the Corniche—the most direct route to Les Goudes, where I lived—I'd turned onto the narrow Rue Curiol, at the end of the Canebière. The Bar des Maraîchers was right at the top of the street, near Place Jean Jaurès.

It felt good to be in Hassan's bar. There were no barriers of age, sex, color or class among the regulars there. We were all friends. You could be sure no one who came there for a
pastis
voted for the National Front, or ever had. Not even once, unlike some people I knew. Everyone in this bar knew why they were from Marseilles and not somewhere else, why they lived in Marseilles and not somewhere else. Friendship hung in the air, along with the fumes of anise. We only had to exchange glances to know we were all the children of exiles. There was something reassuring about that. We had nothing to lose, because we'd already lost everything.

When I came in, Léo Ferré was singing:

 

I sense the arrival

of trains full of Brownings,

Berettas and black flowers

And florists preparing bloodbaths

For the news on color TV . . .

 

I'd had a
pastis
at the bar, and Hassan had refilled it, as usual. After that, I'd lost count of how many
pastis
I had. At one point, maybe when I was on my fourth, Hassan had leaned towards me.

“Don't you think working class people are a bit clumsy?”

It wasn't a question. It was just an observation. A statement. Hassan wasn't the talkative type. But he liked to come out with little phrases like that to whoever was at the bar. Like a maxim to be pondered.

“What am I supposed to say to that?” I'd replied.

“Nothing. There's nothing to say. We do what we can. That's all. Come on, finish your drink.”

The bar had gradually filled up, sending the temperature several degrees higher. Some people went outside to drink, but it wasn't much better there. Night had fallen, but there still wasn't a hint of coolness. The mugginess was overwhelming.

 

I'd gone out on the sidewalk to talk with Didier Perez. He'd come in to Hassan's and as soon as he saw me had come straight up to me.

“Just the man I wanted to see.”

“You're in luck. I was planning to go fishing.”