Total Chaos (13 page)

“Hi, sailor,” she said. “Hmm, I could use a
pastis
.”

I'd started the barbecue on the terrace. Honorine brought the cod tongues. They were marinating in a pot with oil, chopped parsley and pepper. I'd followed her instructions and made fritters, using two stiffly beaten egg whites for the pastry.

“Go and drink your
pastis
in peace, you two. I'll take care of the rest.”

Cod tongues, she told us when we sat down to eat, were a refined dish. They could be made with grated cheese, with a clam or
Provençale
sauce, in foil parcels, or even cooked in white wine with a few strips of truffles and mushrooms. But, in her opinion, they were best in fritters. In fact, they were so delicious, Babette and I couldn't wait to try the other recipes.

“Now do I get my stick of barley sugar?” Babette asked, licking her lips.

“Don't you think we're too old for that?”

“You're never too old to have a little treat, sweetheart!”

I needed to think over all the things she'd told me about the underworld. It had been quite a lesson. I was dying to go see Batisti. But it could wait till tomorrow. Today was Sunday, and Sunday was a special day for me.

Babette must have read my thoughts. “Cool it, Fabio. Let it go, it's Sunday.” She stood up and took my hand. “Shall we go for a swim? That'll calm you down!”

We swam until our lungs were bursting. I liked it like that, and so did she. She'd wanted me to take the boat out and head for the sea off the Baie des Singes. I'd had to resist. It was a rule that I never allowed anyone else on the boat. My boat was my island. She'd yelled at me, called me an asshole and a loser, then dived into the water. It was as cool as anyone could wish. When we were breathless and our arms ached, we floated on our backs.

“What do you plan to do about Ugo?”

“Understand first. Then I'll see.”

For the first time I realized that understanding mightn't be enough. Understanding is like opening a door without knowing what's behind it.

“Be careful what you're getting into.”

She dived again and swam toward my house.

It was late. Babette had stayed. We'd gone to get a cuttlefish pizza from Louisette's and ate it on the terrace, drinking a Côtes de Provence rosé from Mas Negrel, chilled just right. We knocked back the whole bottle. Then, slowly, in between cigarettes, searching for the right words, I started talking about Leila. The rape, and everything else. By the time I finished, it was dark. I fell silent. I was drained. Silence enveloped us. No music, nothing. Nothing but the sound of the water against the rocks. And whispers in the distance.

On the sea wall, families were having dinner by the dim light of kerosene lamps, their fishing rods wedged into the rock. Occasionally, we heard laughter, followed by a ‘shhh.' As if laughing might frighten away the fish. We were in a distant place, a long way from the all the shit of the world. There was a feeling of happiness. The waves. The voices in the distance. The salt smell. Even Babette beside me.

She ran her hand through my hair and gently drew my head down onto her shoulder. She smelled of the sea. Tenderly, she stroked my cheek, then my neck, then moved her hand up again to the back of my head. It felt soft. At last, I started to cry.

T
he aroma of coffee woke me. That was something that hadn't happened in years. Since long before Rosa. Getting her out of bed in the morning was no easy matter. Seeing her get up to make coffee was little short of a miracle. Carmen maybe? I couldn't remember. I smelled toast, and decided to get up. Babette hadn't gone home. She'd lain down next to me. I'd rested my head on her shoulder. She'd put her arm around me. I'd fallen asleep, without another word. I'd said everything there was to say. My despair, my hates, my solitude.

On the terrace, breakfast was ready. Bob Marley was singing
Stir It Up
. It suited the day. Blue sky, glassy sea, sun already up. Babette had put on my bathrobe. She had a cigarette in her mouth, and was buttering bread, her body moving almost imperceptibly to the rhythm of the music. For a fraction of a second, happiness existed.

“I should have married you!” I said.

“Don't talk bullshit!”

And instead of giving me her lips to kiss, she offered me her cheek. She was establishing a new relationship between us. We'd moved into a world where lies had ceased to exist. I liked Babette. I told her so.

“You're nuts, Fabio, you know that? You're crazy for love. I'm crazy for sex. No common ground.” She looked at me as if she was seeing me for the first time. “And ultimately, I prefer it that way. Because I like you too.”

The coffee she'd made was delicious. She told me she was going to propose an investigation into Marseilles for
Libération
. The economic downturn, the Mafia, soccer. It would be a way of getting paid for the information she'd be bringing me. When she left, she promised to call me in two or three days.

I sat there smoking and looking at the sea. Babette had painted me a precise picture of the situation. The Marseilles underworld was finished. Inter-gang rivalry had weakened it, and there was nobody around these days who had the caliber to be a boss. Marseilles was just a market now, coveted by the Neapolitan Camorra, whose activities centered on the heroin and cocaine traffic. In 1991, a Milan weekly called
Il Mondo
had estimated the turnover of the Camorra bosses Carmine Alfieri and Lorenzo Novoletta at seven billion and six billion dollars respectively. For the past ten years, two organizations had been fighting it out for control of Marseilles: the New Camorra, run by Raffaele Cutolo, and the New Family, controlled by the Volgro and Guiliano families.

Zucca had chosen sides.
La Nuova famiglia
. He'd pulled out of prostitution, night clubs and gambling, leaving part of it to the Arab mafia and the other part to the Marseilles gangs who'd taken over from the Corsicans. He ran things for them, but his real business was with the Camorra boss Michele Zaza, known as O Pazzo, the Madman, who operated the Naples-Marseilles-Sint Marteens route, Sint Marteens being the Dutch part of the island of Saint-Martin in the West Indies. For Zaza, Zucca recycled drug profits into supermarkets, restaurants and apartment buildings. They practically owned Boulevard Longchamp, one of the ritziest streets in the city.

Zaza had been busted a month earlier at Villeneuve-Loubet, near Nice, in a
Mare verde
operation. But that made no difference to anything. With a skill that amounted almost to genius, Zucca had developed strong financial connections with Switzerland and Germany. Zucca was protected by the Neapolitans. Everyone knew that. Taking him out was an act of total insanity.

I'd told Babette it was Ugo who killed Zucca, in revenge for Manu. And that I couldn't see who might have put an idea like that in his head, or why. I rang Batisti.

“Fabio Montale. Name mean anything to you?”

“The cop,” he replied, after a short silence.

“Manu's friend, and Ugo's.”

He gave a short, ironic laugh.

“I want to see you.”

“I'm really busy right now.”

“I'm not. I'm even free at noon. Why don't you invite me somewhere nice? We need to talk.”

“And if I don't?”

“I can make things difficult for you.”

“So can I.”

“But from what I hear, you don't like too much publicity.”

 

I was feeling great when I got back to the station. My head was clear, and I was determined to see this through to the end, for Ugo's sake. The Leila case I'd leave to the official investigation for the moment. I went down to the squad room for the weekly ritual of putting the teams together.

Fifty uniformed cops. Ten cars. Two vans. Night teams, day teams. Allocated by neighborhoods, housing projects, supermarkets, service stations, banks, post offices, schools. Routine. Some of the guys I hardly knew, some not at all. They were rarely the same. Not quite the mission I'd originally been given. Young and old. Family men and young married men. Quiet family men and young guys spoiling for a fight. Not racists, or only toward Arabs. And blacks, and gypsies. That was none of my business. All I had to do was put the teams together. I did the roll call, and chose the team members according to the guys' faces, which didn't always give the best results.

Among the guys was a West Indian. He was the first one they'd sent me. Tall, well built, with close-cropped hair. I didn't like that. Guys like that think they're more French than a peasant from the Auvergne. They weren't crazy about Arabs. Or gypsies.

I'd rubbed shoulders with them in Paris, at the Belleville precinct. They really took it out on anyone who wasn't a peasant from the Auvergne. “You don't see any Arabs where I come from,” one of them had said to me. “Well, they've chosen which side they're on!” I didn't feel like I was on any particular side. I was simply serving the law. But events were proving him right. I preferred to see guys like that working for the Post Office, or the electricity company. The West Indian answered to his name. Luc Reiver. I put him together with three older guys. I was interested to see what would happen.

Days are only beautiful early in the morning. I should have remembered that. Dawn is merely an illusion that the world is beautiful. When the world opens its eyes, reality reasserts itself, and you're back with the same old shit. That's what I told myself when Loubet came into my office. I knew what it was about, because he remained standing, with his hands in his pockets.

“The girl was killed around two o'clock on Saturday morning. With the heat, and the field mice... well, it could have been even more disgusting than it was. What happened before that, we don't know. According to the lab, she was gang-raped. Thursday, Friday. But not where she was found... From behind and in front, if you really want to know.”

“You can spare me the details.”

From the right pocket of his jacket, he took a little plastic bag. One by one, he placed three bullets on the table.

“These were taken from the girl's body.”

I looked at him, and waited. He took another small bag from his left pocket, and put down two bullets, parallel with the others.

“And these we took from Al Dakhil and his bodyguards.”

They were identical. They'd come from the same weapons. The two killers and the rapists were the same. My throat went dry. “Shit!” I managed to say.

“The case is closed, Fabio.”

“There's one missing.” I pointed to the third bullet. An Astra special.

He looked straight back at me. “They didn't use it on Saturday night.”

“There were only two of them. There's a third man still out there.”

“A third man? Where did you get that idea?”

I had a theory about rapes. A rape could only be committed by one man or three, never two. With two, there has to be one who doesn't mind waiting his turn. One man alone was the classic. With three, it became a perverted game. But I'd only just constructed this theory. It was a pure hunch. And it came out of anger. I couldn't accept that the case was closed. There had to be another man, because I had to find him.

Loubet looked at me regretfully. He collected the bullets and put them back in their bags. “I'm open to suggestion, but... I do have four other cases on my hands.”

He was holding the bullet from the Astra special between his fingers.

“Is this the one that perforated her heart?” I asked.

He looked surprised. “I have no idea. Why?”

“I'd like to know.”

An hour later, he called to confirm. That was indeed the bullet that had perforated Leila's heart. Of course, that didn't get me anywhere. It just endowed that particular bullet with its own mystery, a mystery I was determined to solve. From Loubet's tone, I guessed he didn't consider the case completely closed.

 

I met Batisti at the Bar de la Marine. The place he hung out. It had become a meeting place for skippers. Louis Audibert's painting of the card game from
Marius
and the photo of Pagnol and his wife on the waterfront were both still on the wall. At a table behind us, Marcel, the owner, was explaining to two Italian tourists that, yes, the movie really had been filmed here. The dish of the day was fried cuttlefish and aubergine in grated cheese. With a nice Le Rousset rosé, from the owner's reserve stock.

I'd come on foot. For the pleasure of strolling around the harbor, eating salted peanuts. I loved that walk. Quai du Port, Quai des Belges, Quai de Rive-Neuve. I loved the smell of the harbor. Sea and oil.

The fishwives were as loud as ever. They were selling the day's catch. Bream, sardine, bass and pandora. In front of an African's stall, a group of Germans were haggling over some little ebony elephants. The African would get the better of them. He'd add a fake silver bracelet, with a fake hallmark, agree to a hundred francs for the lot, and still come out on top. I smiled. It was as if I'd always known these things. My father let go of my hand, and I ran toward the elephants and crouched to see them better. I didn't dare touch them. The African was looking at me and rolling his eyes. It was my father's first present to me. I was four years old.

“Why did you point Ugo in Zucca's direction?” I asked Batisti. “That's all I want to know. And who stands to gain by it?”

Bastisti was a sly old fox. He chewed his food slowly, and finished his glass of wine. “How much do you know?”

“I know a lot of things I shouldn't know.”

He looked straight at me, trying to figure out if I was bluffing. I didn't bat an eyelid. “My informants were positive.”

“Stop right there, Batisti! I don't give a damn about your informants, because they don't exist! You'd been told what to say, and you said it. You sent Ugo to do what nobody else had the balls to do, because it was too risky. Zucca was being protected. And then Ugo got himself whacked. By cops. Cops who knew what he'd done. It was a trap.”