Total Chaos (4 page)

He lowered the visor on his helmet, and gripped the gun firmly. His hands were dry. He moved forward slowly, hugging the curb, his left hand tight on the handlebar. The poodle appeared, followed by Zucca. He felt suddenly cold inside. Zucca saw him coming. He stopped at the edge of the sidewalk, holding back the dog. By the time he realized, it was too late. His mouth formed a circle, but no sound emerged. His eyes widened with fear. If he'd crapped in his pants, that would have been enough. He pressed the trigger. Disgusted with himself, with Zucca, with all men, all mankind. He emptied the clip into the guy's chest.

In front of the villa, the Mercedes shot forward. To his right, the bus was coming. It passed the stop, without slowing down. He accelerated, cut across the path of the bus, and went around it. He almost had to mount the sidewalk, but he got through. The bus came to an abrupt halt, stopping the Mercedes from entering the street. He rode flat out, turning left, then left again, onto Chemin du Souvenir, then Rue des Roses. On Rue des Bois-Sacrés, he threw the gun into a manhole. A few minutes later, he was riding calmly along Rue d'Endoume.

It was only then that he started thinking about Lole. You stood facing each other. You'd both gone beyond words. You wanted her belly against yours. You wanted the taste of her body. The smell. Mint and basil. But there were too many years between you, and too much silence. And Manu. Dead, yet still so alive. You were standing two feet apart. You could have put out your hand and taken her by the waist and drawn her to you. She could have untied the belt of her bathrobe and dazzled you with the beauty of her body. You'd have made love, violently, with unassuaged desire. But what would have happened afterwards? You'd have had to find words. Words that didn't exist. You'd have lost her forever. So you left. Without saying goodbye. Without a kiss. For the second time.

He was shaking. He pulled up outside the first bistro he came to on Boulevard de La Corderie. Like an automaton, he locked the moped and took off his helmet. He had a cognac. He felt the burning sensation spread through him. The cold flowed out of his body. He began to sweat. He rushed to the toilets and threw up. Threw up all he'd done, all he'd thought. Threw up the man that he was. The man who'd abandoned Manu and hadn't had the courage to love Lole. He'd drifted for so long. Too long. He knew that the worst was yet to come. By the second cognac, he'd stopped shaking. He'd recovered.

He parked at Fontaine-de-Caylus. It was 6:20, but the Arab kids weren't there, which surprised him. He took off his helmet and hooked it on the handlebars, but didn't cut the engine. The youngest of the Arabs appeared, kicking a ball. He ran up to him.

“Get out of here, the pigs are coming. They've been watching your girlfriend's house.”

He set off, back up the alley. They must be watching all the back streets. Montée des Accoules, Traverse des Repenties. Place de Lenche, of course. He'd forgotten to ask Lole if Frankie Malabe had come back. He might have a chance if he took Rue des Cartiers, right up at the top. He left the moped and ran down the steps. There were two of them, two young plainclothes cops, at the bottom of the steps.

“Police!”

He heard the siren, higher up the street. He was trapped. Car doors slammed. They were here. Behind his back.

“Don't move!”

He did what he had to do. He plunged his hand inside his jacket. He had to get it over with. No more running. He was here. He was home. In his own neighborhood. It might as well be here. Might as well end in Marseilles. He turned toward the two young cops. The ones behind him couldn't see that he was unarmed. The first bullet ripped open his back. His lung exploded. He didn't feel the other two bullets.

I
crouched by the body. Pierre Ugolini. Ugo. I'd only just arrived on the scene. Too late. My colleagues had been playing cowboys. Shoot to kill: that was their basic rule. They followed the General Custer principle that the only good Indian was a dead Indian. And in Marseilles, everyone—or almost everyone—was an Indian.

The Ugolini file had landed on the wrong desk. Captain Auch's desk. In a few years, his team had gained an evil reputation, but it had proved itself. People turned a blind eye to its occasional mistakes. Cracking down on organized crime was a priority in Marseilles. The second priority was maintaining order in the north of the city, where the suburbs were full of immigrants and the housing projects had become no-go areas. That was my job. But I wasn't allowed any mistakes.

Ugo was a childhood friend. Like Manu. He was a friend, even though he and I hadn't talked in twenty years. Ugo dying so soon after Manu cast a shadow over my past. It was something I'd tried to avoid. But I'd gone about it the wrong way.

When I found out that Auch had been given the job of investigating why Ugo was in Marseilles, I'd put one of my informers on the case. Frankie Malabe. I trusted him. If Ugo came to Marseilles, it was obvious he'd go to Lole's, in spite of all the time that had passed. And I'd been sure Ugo would come. Because of Manu, and because of Lole. Friendship has its rules, you can't avoid them. I'd been expecting Ugo for three months. Because I too thought that Manu's death couldn't be left open. There had to be an explanation. There had to be a culprit. Justice had to be done. I wanted to see Ugo, to talk about that. About justice. I was a cop and he was a criminal, but I wanted to stop him doing anything stupid. To protect him from Auch. But to find Ugo, I had to see Lole again, and since Manu's death, I'd lost track of her.

Frankie Malabe had been efficient. He'd hung out at the Vamping, spoken to Lole. But he hadn't passed his information on to me until a day after he'd offered it to Auch. Auch had the power, and he was tough. The informers were scared of him. And being the scumbags they were, they tended to look after their own interests. I should have known that.

My other mistake had been not going to see Lole myself the other evening. I can be a bit of a coward sometimes. I couldn't make up my mind to just show up at the Vamping after three months. Three months from the night following Manu's death. Maybe Lole wouldn't even have spoken to me. Or maybe, seeing me, she'd have gotten the message. And then Ugo would have gotten it, too.

Ugo. He stared up at me with his dead eyes, a smile on his lips. I closed his eyelids. The smile remained. It wouldn't go away now.

I stood up. There was a lot of bustle around me. Orlandi stepped forward to take photos. I looked down at Ugo's body. His hand was open. The Smith and Wesson lay on the step, like an extension of the hand. Orlandi snapped him. What had really happened? Was he getting ready to shoot? Had there been the usual warnings? I'd never know. Or maybe one day in hell, when I met Ugo again. Because the only witnesses would be those chosen by Auch. The people in the neighborhood would keep shtum. Their word wasn't worth anything. I turned away. Auch had just made his appearance. He walked up to me.

“I'm sorry, Fabio. About your friend.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

I went back up Rue des Cartiers. I passed Morvan, the team's crack shot. A face like Lee Marvin. A killer's face, not a cop's. I put all the hatred I had into the look I gave him. He didn't turn away. For him, I didn't exist. I was a nobody. Just a neighborhood cop.

At the top of the street, a group of Arab kids stood watching the scene.

“Get lost, boys.”

They looked at each other, then at the oldest in the gang, then at the moped lying on the ground behind them. The moped abandoned by Ugo. When he was being chased, I'd been on the terrace of the Bar du Refuge, watching Lole's apartment building. I'd finally decided to make a move. Too much time had passed. The risks were getting greater every day. There was no one in the apartment. But I was ready to wait for Lole or Ugo for as long as it took. Ugo had passed just a few yards from me.

“What's your name?”

“Djamel.”

“Is that your moped?”

He didn't reply.

“Pick it up and get out of here. While they're still busy.”

Nobody moved. Djamel was looking at me, puzzled.

“Clean it, and then hide it for a few days. Do you understand?”

I turned my back on them and walked toward my car. I didn't look back. I lit a cigarette, a Winston, then threw it away. It tasted disgusting. For a month, I'd been trying to change from Gauloises to Virginia cigarettes, to alleviate my cough. In the rear-view mirror, I made sure the moped and the kids were gone. I closed my eyes. I wanted to cry.

 

Back at the station house, I was told about Zucca. And the killer on the moped. Zucca hadn't been an underworld boss, but he had been a vital linchpin, with all the bosses dead or in prison or on the run. Zucca's death was good news for us, the cops. For Auch, anyhow. I immediately made the connection with Ugo. But I didn't tell anyone. What difference did it make? Manu was dead. Ugo was dead. And Zucca wasn't worth shedding any tears over.

The ferry for Ajaccio was leaving the harbor basin. The
Monte d'Oro
. The only advantage of my shabby office in the station house was that I had a window that looked out on the port of La Joliette. The ferries were almost the only activity left in the port. Ferries for Ajaccio, Bastia, Algiers. A few liners too, doing senior citizen cruises. But there was also still quite a bit of freight. Even now, Marseilles was the third largest port in Europe. Far ahead of its nearest rival, Genoa. The racks of bananas and pineapples from the Ivory Coast piled at the end of the Léon Gousset pier seemed to guarantee Marseilles' future. A last hope.

The harbor had attracted serious interest from property developers. Two hundred hectares to build on, a sizeable fortune. They could easily envisage transferring the port to Fos and building a new Marseilles by the sea. They already had the architects, and the plans were progressing well. But I couldn't imagine Marseilles without its harbor basins, or its old fashioned boathouses without boats. I liked boats. Real boats, big ones. I liked to watch them setting sail. I always felt a twinge of sorrow. The
Ville de Naples
was leaving port, all lit up. I was on the pier, in tears. On board, my cousin Sandra. With her parents and her brothers, they'd stopped off for two days in Marseilles, and now they were leaving again, for Buenos Aires. I was in love with Sandra. I was nine years old. I'd never seen her again. She'd never written me. Fortunately, she wasn't my only cousin.

The ferry had turned into the Grande Joliette basin. It glided behind the cathedral of La Major. The setting sun gave the gray, grime-incrusted stone a degree of warmth. At such times, La Major, with its Byzantine curves, looked almost beautiful. Afterwards, it reverted to being what it had always been: a pompous piece of Second Empire crap. I watched the ferry move slowly past the Sainte-Marie sea wall and head for the open sea. For tourists who'd spent a day, maybe a night, in transit in Marseilles, it was the start of the crossing. By tomorrow morning, they'd be on the Île de Beauté. They'd remember a few things about Marseilles. The Vieux Port. Notre Dame de la Garde, which dominates it. The Corniche, maybe. And the Pharo Palace, which they could see now to their left.

Marseilles isn't a city for tourists. There's nothing to see. Its beauty can't be photographed. It can only be shared. It's a place where you have to take sides, be passionately for or against. Only then can you see what there is to see. And you realize, too late, that you're in the middle of a tragedy. An ancient tragedy in which the hero is death. In Marseilles, even to lose you have to know how to fight.

The ferry was now just a dark patch in the setting sun. I was too much of a cop to take things at face value. There was a lot I couldn't figure out. Who'd put Ugo on to Zucca so quickly? Had Zucca really ordered the hit on Manu? Why? And why hadn't Auch collared Ugo last night? Or this morning? And where was Lole at the time?

Lole. Like Manu and Ugo, I hadn't noticed her growing up, becoming a woman. Then, like them, I'd fallen in love with her. But I had no claims on her. I wasn't from the Panier. I was born there, but when I was two years old, my parents moved to the Capelette, a wop neighborhood. The most you could hope for—and it was a lot—was to be good friends with Lole. Where I'd really been lucky was in being friends with Manu and Ugo.

At that time, I still had family in the neighborhood, on Rue des Cordelles. Three cousins: two boys and a girl. The girl's name was Angèle. Gélou, we called her. She was grown up. Almost seventeen. She often came to our house. She helped my mother, who was already bedridden most of the time. Afterwards, I had to walk her home. It wasn't really dangerous in those days, but Gélou didn't like to go home on her own. And I liked to walk with her. She was beautiful, and I felt proud when she gave me her arm. The problem started when we reached the Accoules. I didn't like to go into the neighborhood. It was dirty, and it stank. I felt ashamed. Most of all, I was scared stiff. Not when I was with her, but when I walked back alone. Gélou knew that, and it amused her. I didn't dare ask my brothers to walk back with me. I'd set off at a near run, eyes down. There were often boys my age at the corner of Rue du Panier and Rue des Muettes. I'd hear them laughing as I passed. Sometimes they whistled at me, as if I was a girl.

One evening, at the end of summer, Gélou and I were coming up Rue des Petits-Moulins. Arm in arm, like lovers. Her breast brushed the back of my hand. It drove me wild. I was happy. Then I saw them, the two of them. I'd already passed them several times. I guessed we were the same age. Fourteen. They were coming toward us, smiling maliciously. Gélou tightened her grip on my arm, and I felt the warmth of her breast on my hand.

They stepped aside as we passed. The taller one on Gélou's side, the shorter one on my side. He shoved me with his shoulder, and laughed uproariously. I let go of Gélou's arm.