Solea (20 page)

“My father indicted him for violation of the rules on the financing of political parties, misuse of social property, breach of trust, forgery and the use of forgeries. He was the first Swiss banker to be prosecuted in France in a case with political connections.

“My father could have stopped there. But he decided to follow up the financial connections. And that was when things got out of hand. Raymond also handled accounts for Spanish and Libyan clients as well as General Mobutu's real estate holdings, which have since been sold. In addition, he owned a casino in Switzerland on behalf of a group in Bordeaux, and managed about fifty Panamanian companies on behalf of Swiss, French and Italian firms . . .”

“The perfect set-up.”

“Your friend Babette has gone where my father couldn't go. Right to the heart of the machine. Before coming here, I reread a few passages of her draft report. She uses the South of France as an example, but what she says holds true for the whole of the European Union. I was particularly struck by the terrible contradiction she points out: that the less united the States that signed up to Maastricht are against the Mafia, the more the Mafia flourishes on the dung heap—that's the term she uses—of obsolete and incompatible national laws.”

“Yes,” I said, “I read that too.”

I'd almost talked about this earlier to Fonfon and Honorine. But then I'd told myself they'd already heard enough. It didn't tell them anything new about the mess Babette was in—the mess I was in too.

Babette backed up her comments with statements by leading European officials.
“What makes this failure of the Maastricht signatories all the more serious,”
Diemut Theato, chairman of the European Parliament's budget control committee, asserted,
“is that greater and greater sacrifices are being demanded of European taxpayers, at the same time as the frauds uncovered in 1996 amount to 1.4% of the budget.”
And Anita Gradin, the commissioner in charge of fraud prevention, stated,
“Criminal organizations operate on the principle of minimum risk: they spread their different activities across the member States, choosing for each one that State where the risk is smallest.”

I poured Hélène Pessayre another glass of wine.

“It's delicious,” she said.

I didn't know if she really meant it. Her thoughts seemed to be elsewhere. On Babette's disks. Or in the place where her father had met his death. Her eyes came to rest on me. Her look was tender and affectionate. I wanted to take her in my arms and hold her. Kiss her. But that was the last thing to do.

“We started receiving anonymous letters in the mail. I've never forgotten what the last one said. ‘There's no point in trying to protect your family, or in scattering documents all over the country. Nothing escapes us. So please see reason and drop the case.'

“My mother refused to leave, and so did my brothers and I. We didn't really believe in these threats. ‘They're just trying to intimidate us,' my father would say. Not that that stopped him from asking for police protection. The house was put under twenty-four-hour surveillance. And he had two inspectors with him everywhere he went. So did we, but more discreetly. I don't know how long we could have gone on living like that . . .” She broke off, and looked down at the wine in her glass. “One evening, he was found in the garage of our building. In his car, with his throat cut.”

She looked up at me. The veil had gone from her eyes, and they had regained their dark brilliance.

“The weapon used was a double-edged knife, with a blade nearly six inches long and just one inch wide.” It was the police captain speaking now. The crime expert. “The same one used on Sonia De Luca and Georges Mavros.”

“You don't mean it's the same man?”

“No. The same weapon. The same type of knife. It struck me when I read the pathologist's report on Sonia. It took me back eight years, you know?”

I remembered what I'd thrown in her face on the terrace at Ange's, and suddenly I didn't feel proud of myself. “I'm sorry about what I said the other day.”

She shrugged. “But it's true, I don't have anything else to do in my life. Only that. It was what I wanted. It was the only reason I became a cop. To fight crime. Especially organized crime. That's my life, now.”

How could she be so determined? The words were cold, passionless, a statement of fact.

“You can't live for revenge,” I said, imagining that was what drove her.

“Who said anything about revenge? I'm not out to avenge my father's death. All I'm trying to do is continue what he started. In my own way. In a different line of work. The killer was never arrested. In the end, the case was closed. That's why I made the choice I did. Why I joined the police.” She drank some wine, then went on, “Revenge gets you nowhere. Neither does pessimism, like I said. You just have to be determined.” She looked at me. “And realistic.”

Realism. In my opinion, a word used to justify moral complacency, meanness, and the shameful sins of omission that men committed every day. Realism also allowed those who had power in this society—even just scraps, crumbs of power—to crush everyone else.

I preferred not to be drawn into an argument with her.

“Why aren't you saying anything?” she asked, with a touch of irony.

“Being a realist means getting screwed.”

“My sentiments exactly.” She smiled. “I only said it to see how you'd react.”

“And I was afraid you were going to slap me.”

She smiled again. I liked her smile. The dimples it made in her cheeks. I was becoming familiar with that smile. And with Hélène Pessayre.

“Fabio,” she said.

It was the first time she'd called me by my first name. And I really liked the way she said it. I waited for the worst.

“I looked at the black disk. I read it.”

“You're crazy!”

“It's really horrible.”

It was as if she was paralyzed.

I held out my hand to her. She put her hand on mine and squeezed it. Hard. Everything that might or might not happen between us was contained in that touch.

First, I thought, we had to get out from under the stifling shadow of death. That was what her eyes also seemed to be saying at that moment. And it was like a cry. A silent cry at all the horrors still to come.

T
hose who are dead stay dead, I was thinking, still holding Hélène Pessayre's hand tightly in mine. But we have to carry on living.

“We have to beat death,” I said.

She didn't seem to hear me. She was lost in thought, somewhere far away.

“Hélène,” I said, applying a gentle pressure to her fingers.

“Yes, of course,” she said. “Of course . . .”

She gave a weary smile, then slowly freed her hand from mine, stood up, and took a few steps around the room.

“It's a long time since I last had a man,” she said in a low voice. “I mean, a man who didn't leave early the next morning, trying to find an excuse not to see me again that night, or any other night.”

I stood up and walked toward her.

She was standing by the French window that led out onto my terrace. Her hands deep in the pockets of her jeans, like the other morning at the harbor. She was looking out into the darkness. Toward the open sea. Toward that other shore she had left once. I knew that if you'd been born in Algeria, if you'd grown up there, you could never forget it. Didier Perez never stopped talking about it. From having listened to him, I knew all the seasons of Algiers, its days and its nights. “The silences on summer evenings . . .” He always got a nostalgic look in his eyes when he said that. He missed the place desperately. Above all, those silences on summer evenings. Those brief moments he still thought of as a promise of happiness. I was sure Hélène felt the same thing in her heart.

She turned to look at me. “Absurdity reigns supreme, but love is the salvation, Camus said. All those corpses, the death I see around me every day . . . It's made love impossible for me. Even pleasure . . .”

“Hélène.”

“Don't be embarrassed, Montale. It does me good to talk about these things. Especially with you.”

I could feel her almost physically brooding on her past.

“The last man in my life . . .”

She took out the pack of cigarettes from the pocket of her shirt and offered me one. I lit hers for her.

“It's as if I was cold inside, you know? I loved him. But when he touched me, I . . . I didn't feel anything.”

I'd never talked about these things with a woman. About what happens when the body closes up and doesn't respond.

For a long time, I'd tried to remember the last night Lole and I had made love. The last time we'd embraced as lovers. The last time she'd put her arm around my waist. I'd thought about it for hours, but I still couldn't remember. All I could remember was the night when I'd caressed her body for a long time and finally realized in despair that she was still completely dry.

“I don't want to,” she'd said.

She'd snuggled against me and buried her head in the hollow of my shoulder. My cock had gone soft against her warm belly.

“It's not important,” I'd murmured.

“Yes, it is.”

She was right, it was important. We'd been making love less often for several months now, and every time Lole had felt less pleasure. On another occasion, as I was slowly moving back and forth inside her, I became aware that she was totally absent. Her body was there. But she was far away. Far already. I couldn't come. I slipped out of her. Neither of us moved. Neither of us said a word. We both drifted into sleep.

I looked at Hélène. “You just didn't love the man anymore. That's all.”

“No . . . No, I loved him. I probably still love him. I don't know. I miss his hands on my body. It wakes me at night, sometimes. Though not so much now as it used to.” She dragged pensively on her cigarette. “No, I think it's a lot more serious than that. I have the feeling that death is gradually casting a shadow over my life. And when you realize that's happening . . . how shall I put it . . . ? It's as if you're in the dark. You can't see anything anymore. Not even the face of the person you love. And all the people around you start thinking of you as being more dead than alive.”

If I kissed her now, I told myself, it would be a hopeless gesture. I didn't consider it seriously. It was only a thought, a slightly crazy thought, an attempt not to be sucked in to the dizzying spiral of her words. The place she was going was a place I knew. I'd been there many times myself.

I was starting to understand what she was trying to say. It was all connected with Sonia's death. That death had reminded her of her father and, at the same time, of what her own life had become. Of all the things that unravel as you go on, as you make choices. And the less you concede to life, the closer you get to death. Thirty-four years old. The same age as Sonia. She'd said that several times, the other day, on the terrace at Ange's.

Sonia's sudden death, just when she had the possibility of a future with me, a future in love—maybe the only kind of future we still have left—had reminded Hélène of her own failures. Her own fears. I understood now why she'd been so insistent on knowing what I'd felt for Sonia that night.

“You know . . .” I began. But I left the sentence unfinished.

In my case, it was Mavros's death that had forever deprived me of my adolescence. My youth. Thanks to Mavros—even though we hadn't known each other well as children—I'd been able to bear first Manu's death, then Ugo's.

“What?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

Now, my world was over. I had no idea what exactly that might mean, or what the consequences of it might be in the next few hours. I was starting to realize that now. I thought about what Hélène had just said. Like her, I was in the dark. I couldn't see anything. Only what lay immediately ahead. The things that needed to be done, and once done couldn't be undone. Like killing that Mafia son of a bitch.

She took a last drag on her cigarette, and put it out. Almost angrily. I looked her in the eyes, and she looked at me the same way.

“I think,” she said, “that when something important is about to happen, we're somehow taken out of our normal state. Our thoughts, I mean, my thoughts, your thoughts, reach out to each other . . . Yours to mine, mine to yours . . . Do you understand what I'm saying?”

I didn't want to listen to her anymore. Not really. All I wanted was to hold her in my arms. I was only about three feet from her. I could put my hand on her shoulder, slide it down her back and take her by the waist. But I still wasn't sure it was what she wanted. What she expected of me. Not now. Two corpses lay between us, like a chasm separating us. All we could do was hold out our hands to each other. Taking care not to fall into the chasm.

“I think so,” I said. “We can't live in each other's head. It's too scary. Is that what you mean?”

“More or less. Let's say it leaves us too exposed. If I . . . if we slept together, we'd be too vulnerable . . . afterwards.”

“Afterwards” meant the hours to come. Babette's arrival. The confrontation with the Mafia guys. The choices to be made. Babette's and mine. Which weren't necessarily compatible. Hélène Pessayre's wish to control everything. And Honorine and Fonfon in the background. With their fear too.

“There's no rush,” I replied, stupidly.

“You're talking crap. You want it as much as I do.”

She'd turned to me, and I could see her chest rising slowly. Her lips were slightly parted, waiting only for my lips. I didn't move. Only our eyes dared meet.

“I felt it on the phone earlier. How much you wanted me. Am I right?”