The Snow Kimono (35 page)

I stood there observing Professor Todo, his face. Never have I seen a face so tranquil,
so unburdened by the past.

You are a good person, Tadashi, he said. An honourable person. Say hello to Katsuo
for me when you next see him.

And then he was walking away, as if we had never met, as if we had never encountered
each other on this deserted mountain path one cold and wintry afternoon, years ago.

Chapter 38

INSPECTOR Jovert!

He was on his way home. He had stopped off at the Monoprix opposite the newsstand
to pick up a few things.

He turned to see a young woman facing him. The world folded in on itself. She was
standing on the other side of a bank of cold-storage units. Her face was narrow,
olive-skinned, dark-haired; half-Algerian, he knew instantly—how many hundreds of
these faces had he seen in his life. Luminous, blue-green eyes.

I knew I recognised you, she said. She was coming around the display units to him.
We met at Le Bar l’Anise, she said. On Bastille Day. Actually, it was that night,
at the fireworks. Don’t you remember—I bumped into your table, spilt your wine?

Ah yes, now he remembered. She was the girl he’d looked through, the one in the black
dress. But that’d been July, and here it was, already October.

Yes, of course, he said.

But where to go after this?

I
knew
I knew you, she said. But the light was so poor in the café. I remembered
later—Inspector Jovert. You
are
Inspector Jovert, aren’t you?

Yes, he said. I am.

You testified at my brother’s trial, she said. Mehdi Lambert.

Of course, Mehdi. How could he forget? He looked at her again. He could see the family
resemblance. She had Mehdi’s dark hair. His thin face. His lean build. Different
eyes, though. His were glacial.

I’ve cut my hair, she said. She reached up, pulled at a dark strand. Her hair was
short now, as short as a boy’s. And I’m not wearing my glasses, she said.

But he wasn’t thinking about her. He was thinking about Mehdi. He could still have
given Mehdi’s height and weight if someone had asked. Mehdi Lambert, the seventeen-year-old
boy who had stabbed his stepfather to death in one of those godforsaken socialist-experiments-gone-wrong
high-rises on the outskirts of Paris. How long ago was that? Six, maybe seven years?

It was one of the worst cases he’d ever had to deal with. The stepfather, a violent
alcoholic, a petty criminal, had abused his young children, Mehdi’s half-brother
and half-sister, for years. He was well known to police. Petty theft, burglary, assault
with a weapon, grievous bodily harm. He had even, Jovert knew from the police files,
assaulted the young woman—what
was
her name?—who now stood before him.

But if her stepfather had mistreated her, and her brother, it was to their youngest
half-sibling, a boy of four, that their stepfather devoted his most vicious attention.
The police files showed the boy had been hospitalised four times in his short life—a
fractured skull, he’d fallen off his tricycle; a broken nose, he’d fallen down the
concrete stairs to their apartment; two severely burnt hands, this had been when
the boy was two. According to the boy’s father, the child had been standing on a
stool watching him cook when he had fallen forward, onto the stove. But the father
could not explain how it was that the blistered burns on both his son’s hands, now
infected, were so concentric. It looked, from the photographs, said the prosecutor,
as though the child’s open hands had been held there.

The mother—their mother—had been too frightened to testify.

On the night their stepfather died, so too did their half-brother.

Jovert remembered how the father, unemployed, had come home in a drunken rage. The
mother had been working the night shift at the nearby food-processing factory.

Mehdi had come home at around 8.30, perhaps a little later—he had been at his girlfriend’s—to
hear his stepfather’s raised voice coming from their apartment.

I could hear it the moment the door buzzed open, he said. And as I came up the stairs,
my stepfather’s voice had got louder and louder. By the time I got to the top of
the stairs I realised that he was screaming at Luc.

You fucking son of a bitch, I could hear him saying. You piece of Algerian shit.
What did I tell you? What did I tell you? Answer me, he screamed.

Mehdi told the court that his stepfather had it in for the boy. He was darker than
the rest of them. He accused his wife, their mother, of screwing around.

Look at him, he’d say. Just look at him—he’s as dark as a fucking Arab’s arsehole.
Aren’t you, Luc. And he’d slap him across the head. Hard.

Their mother said it wasn’t true: she had
never
cheated on him.

It happens, she said. Some children are naturally darker. Please, Michel, don’t hurt
him.

I’ll
tell you what happens, he said. When I’m out, you cock-sucking whore, you fuck
other men. You think I don’t know. I see them come and go.

But no one comes and goes, Michel. No one.

Don’t
lie
to me! I
see
them, you fucking lying bitch. I’m
not
stupid, you know. I
have eyes, I can see.

One of his neighbours, an elderly Iranian woman, had been waiting on the next landing
when Mehdi reached the door.

Pauvre petit
, she said as he searched for his keys in his satchel. This no good,
Mehdi. One day he kill him.

You fucking bitch. I’ll show you, you fucking piss-drinking fucking whore.

Something crashed to the floor. There was the sound of breaking glass.

I will
kill
you, you cunt.

For a moment, Mehdi thought his mother must be home. That the two of them were arguing.

Allah, Allah. I sorry, Mehdi. I call police.

What did I tell you? his father was screaming when he entered the kitchen. Don’t-make-sad,
Luc. You make sad again and I swear, I’ll fucking…

Mehdi found Luc and his stepfather in the kitchen. Luc was in his pyjamas. He was
standing on one of the kitchen chairs. Mehdi wondered how long he had been standing
there. The boy had been crying. But now he was silent. Pieces of a broken chair lay
scattered on the kitchen floor. Half a wooden seat. The broken bentwood back. One
piece, a slat or something, was in the kitchen sink. It appeared as though the chair
had exploded. His stepfather was standing opposite the boy. He had a broken chair
leg in his hand.

Luc hadn’t even glanced at Mehdi when he came in. He stood looking down at the floor.
Mehdi could see that there was something wrong with his left arm—it was hanging at
an odd angle. An autopsy would later show that it had been broken in three places.

His father was still shouting at him: Don’t make sad, don’t make sad, Luc. Luc…I’m
not going to ask again.

Luc, what’s happening here? Mehdi asked. Why are you up on a chair?

My stepfather, he said, glanced at me in the doorway. I saw his rage intensify. It
was as if he refused to allow himself to be
judged by me, someone who meant
nothing
to him. I was not
his
son. I saw my stepfather turn the broken chair leg slowly in
his fist so that one of its hard edges faced in. And…and then he struck Luc a blow
to the side of his head with all the force he could muster.

Luc, Mehdi said, had teetered on the chair for an instant. But then it was like the
air had gone out of him, as though he was one of those stovepipe men you sometimes
see waving their arms about outside those places that sell cheap furniture and somebody
had turned the compressor off. Luc collapsed onto the chair. Just like that. Then
he slipped onto the floor.

And he didn’t move. Not once. He just lay there, Mehdi said. I couldn’t believe it.
There was so little of him. Luc. So little. A moment ago he’d been alive. And now…My
stepfather was standing over him, except that it didn’t look like him, like Luc,
anymore. The bloodied chair leg was still in my step-father’s hand, and there was
a look of indescribable hatred on his face.

What have you done? I screamed at him. Oh my god, what have you done? But before
he could answer, I grabbed the kitchen knife that was lying on the bench, and I just
started stabbing, stabbing, stabbing, saying: Never, never,
never
again.

Martine, that was her name. Martine. It had surfaced now. He remembered her testifying.
She’d been in her early twenties
then, had had long dark hair, glasses. He remembered
how quiet she was, how articulate, studious. She could have been the prosecutor herself.

She had testified that she’d moved back to Algiers a couple of years previously.
To escape her stepfather.

Jovert looked at her again. How much more informed her face was now. How much more
subtle. Stronger. He thought of the chasm of time that separated them. They were
several lives apart. But for this temporal accident, had things, life, been otherwise,
he knew he could have fallen for a girl like Martine.

Martine, he said.

Yes, she said, surprised. So you do remember?

I remember, he said. And Mehdi. How is he?

Mehdi had been convicted of manslaughter. Justifiable homicide. His teachers had
testified on his behalf. He was a good student at the
lycée
. He worked hard. His
mother depended on him. Despite this, he was sentenced to jail. Six years, to serve
a minimum of three. There was an appeal. The sentence was too harsh. There had been
mitigating circumstances. The judgment was flawed, it was racist. Mehdi was a half-half.
His mother Algerian. His father French. There had been an outcry. No French boy would
have been jailed under similar circumstances. Mehdi was released from jail, pending
the appeal. But he didn’t wait. He didn’t trust the French justice system. It was
too polluted by history. Instead, he took off for Algiers, where his sister, Martine,
was.

When he thought about it later, it seemed to Jovert that he had spent most of his
life listening to people, sifting through what they said, weighing, assessing. Trying
to fit things together. But life, unlike crime, was not something you could
solve
.
What people told you was not always the truth; the truth was what you found out,
eventually, by putting all the pieces together. And sometimes not even then.

But where did that leave his life? Perhaps, he thought, his life didn’t matter in
the end. It was life itself that mattered. It wasn’t personal. Life just rolled through
you. And then moved on.

Martine told him that she had come back to revive the appeal process, to get help.
But Mehdi had gone into hiding in Algiers. She could not find him.

Now, she thought, she might have found someone who could help her. He was standing
right in front of her.

PART VIII

OMURA