Total Chaos (6 page)

I was certainly sad that evening. Ugo's death was weighing on my mind. I felt suffocated. And alone. More alone than ever. Every year, I ostentatiously crossed out of my address book any friend who'd made a racist remark, neglected those whose only ambition was a new car and a Club Med vacation, and forgot all those who played the Lottery. I loved fishing and silence. Walking in the hills. Drinking cold Cassis, Lagavulin or Oban late into the night. I didn't talk much. Had opinions about everything. Life and death. Good and evil. I was a film buff. Loved music. I'd stopped reading contemporary novels. More than anything, I loathed half-hearted, spineless people.

A fair number of women had found that attractive. I hadn't been able to hold on to any of them. It was always the same story. No sooner had they settled into our new life together than they'd set about trying to change the very things they liked about me. “You'll never change,” Rosa had said when she left, six years ago. She'd tried for two years. I'd resisted. Even more than I had with Muriel, Carmen and Alice. And I'd always find myself alone again one night with an empty glass and an ashtray full of cigarette butts.

I drank the wine straight from the bottle. Another one of those nights when I wondered why I was still a cop. Five years ago I'd been assigned to the Neighborhood Surveillance Squad, a unit of untrained cops given the job of keeping order in North Marseilles. I had plenty of experience, and I could keep a cool head. Just the guy to send to the front line when the shit hit the fan. Lahaouri Ben Mohamed, a seventeen-year-old, had been shot dead during a routine identity check. The anti-racist organizations had protested, the left-wing parties had mobilized their members. The usual thing. But he was only an Arab. No reason to care too much about his human rights. In February 1988 on the other hand, when Charles Dovero, the son of a taxi driver, was gunned down, the city was in turmoil. Goddammit, this one was a Frenchman. This time, the police had made a real mistake. Something had to be done. That was where I came in. I took up my post with my head full of illusions. I was going to explain, to persuade. I was going to find answers, preferably good ones. I was going to help. That was the day I'd started down what my colleagues called the slippery slope. The day I'd started to become less of a cop and more of a youth counselor or social worker. Since then, I'd lost the trust of my superiors and made myself a fair number of enemies. True, there hadn't been anymore mistakes, and petty crime hadn't increased, but the tally was nothing to boast about: no spectacular arrests, no big media stunts. Routine, however well managed, was just routine.

The reforms—and there were lots of them—increased my isolation. Nobody new was assigned to the squad. And one day I woke up and realized I'd lost all my power. I'd been disowned by the anti-crime squad, the narcotics squad, the vice squad, the illegal immigration squad. Not to mention the squad waging war on organized crime, led so brilliantly by Auch. I'd become just a neighborhood cop who didn't get any important cases. But, since the Colonial Army, being a cop was the only thing I knew. And nobody had ever challenged me to do anything else. But I knew my colleagues were right, I was on the slippery slope. I wasn't the kind of cop who could shoot a punk in the back to save a colleague's skin, and that meant I was dangerous.

The message machine was flashing. It was late. Everything could wait. I'd just had a shower. I poured myself a glass of Lagavulin, put on a Thelonius Monk album, and went to bed with Conrad's
Between the Tides
. My eyes closed. Monk kept going, solo.

I
drew up in the parking lot of La Paternelle. A largely Arab housing project. It wasn't the toughest, but it certainly wasn't the best. It was barely ten o'clock and it was already very hot. The sun had free rein here. No trees, nothing. Just the project, the parking lot, and a patch of waste ground. In the distance, the sea. L'Estaque and its harbor. Like another continent. I remembered a song by Aznavour: Poverty isn't so hard in the sun. I don't suppose he'd ever been here, to this pile of shit and concrete.

It wasn't long after I'd first arrived in the projects that I rubbed shoulders with the three groups who stand out from the crowd and freak people out, not just people downtown, but people in the projects too: the punks, the junkies and the dropouts. The punks are teenagers with a long experience of crime behind them. Holdup men, dealers, racketeers. Some, although barely seventeen, have already done a couple of years in the joint, with several years ‘conditional discharge.' They're young, tough and scary, and they'll use a flick knife at the drop of a hat. The junkies, on the other hand, aren't looking for trouble. It's just that sometimes they need cash, and to get it they'd pull any stupid stunt. Whatever they get, they have it coming. Just showing their faces is tantamount to a confession.

The dropouts are cool guys. They don't do anything stupid, and they don't have a police record. They're enrolled in vocational courses, but never attend, which suits everybody just fine: it reduces class numbers and allows the college to hire extra teachers. They spend their afternoons at FNAC or Virgin. Scrounge a smoke here, a hundred francs there. They're resourceful, and clean. Until the day they start dreaming of driving a BMW, because they're pissed off taking the bus. Or they're suddenly ‘inspired' by dope and start shooting up.

Then there are all the others, the ones I discovered later. A whole mass of kids who have no story other than that they were born here. And that they're Arabs. Or blacks, or gypsies, or Comorans. High school kids, temporary workers, the unemployed, public nuisances, the sports fans. Their teenage years are spent walking a tightrope. A tightrope from which they're almost all likely to fall. Where will they land? Punk, junkie, dropout? Nobody knows. It's a lottery. They'll find out sooner or later. For me it's always too soon, for them it's too late. In the meantime, they get picked up for trivial offences. Riding a bus without a ticket, a fight on the way out of school, petty shoplifting from a supermarket.

These were the kind of things they discussed on Radio Galère, a talk radio station I listened to regularly in the car. I waited now for the end of the show, with the car door open.

“Our old folks can't help us anymore, dammit! Take me, for instance. I get to eighteen, I need fifty or a hundred francs on a Friday night. It's only natural. There are five of us. Where do you think the old man's going to find five hundred francs? So, then what happens, I don't say me, but... my brother for example, he has to—”

“Pick someone's pocket!”

“That's no joke!”

“Right! And the guy who gets his money stolen sees it's an Arab. And straight away he joins the National Front!”

“Even if he isn't a racist, man!”

“It could have been, I don't know, a Portuguese, a Frenchman, a gypsy.”

“Or a Swiss guy! Shit, man! There are thieves everywhere.”

“Just your luck that in Marseille, it's more likely to be an Arab than a Swiss guy.”

Since the neighborhood had become my beat, I'd collared a few real gangsters, and a reasonable number of dealers and holdup men. Caught them red-handed, chased them through the projects or out along the beltway. Next stop Les Baumettes, Marseilles' biggest jail. I had no pity for them, no hate either. But I did have my doubts. Whoever the guy is, he goes into the joint at eighteen, his life is screwed up. When I was doing holdups with Manu and Ugo, we didn't think about the risks. We knew the rules. You play the game. If you win, fine. If you lose, too bad. If you don't like it, you might as well stay at home.

The rules were still the same now. But the risks were a hundred times greater. And the prisons were overflowing with minors. Six minors for every one adult. A figure I found really depressing.

About ten kids were chasing each other, throwing stones as big as fists. “As long as they're doing that, they aren't doing something stupid,” one of the mothers had told me. What she meant by ‘something stupid' was something you called in the police for. This was just the junior version of the OK Corral. In front of Block C12, six Arab kids, aged from twelve to seventeen, stood talking. In the few feet of shade offered by the building. They saw me coming toward them. Especially the oldest of them, Rachid. He started shaking his head and making blowing noises, convinced that just my being there meant the hassles were starting. I had no intention of disappointing him. “Open air classes today?” I said, to no one in particular.

“It's teachers' day, monsieur,” the youngest of them said. “They have classes for each other.”

“Yeah, to see if they're good enough to stuff our heads with their shit,” another kid said.

“Great. So I guess this is kind of like your practical work right now?”

“What do you mean?” Rachid said. “We ain't doin' nothin' wrong.”

For him, school was long over. Expelled from vocational college, after threatening a teacher who called him a moron. A good kid, all the same. He was hoping for an apprenticeship. Like a lot of kids in the projects. That was the future, waiting to go on some kind of course, whatever it was. It was better than waiting for nothing at all.

“I didn't say you were, I was just asking.” He was wearing a blue and white tracksuit: the colors of OM, the Marseilles soccer team. I felt the material. “Mmm. Brand new.”

“It's paid for. My mother bought it for me.”

I put my arm around his shoulders and pulled him away from the group. His friends looked at me as if I'd broken the law. They were ready to scream.

“Look, Rachid, I'm going over there to B7. You see? Fifth floor. To Mouloud's apartment. Mouloud Laarbi. Do you know him?”

“Yeah. What about it?”

“I'll be there... oh, maybe an hour.”

“What's it to me?”

I walked him a few more steps, toward my car. “Now, this is my car. Nothing amazing, I can hear you say. I agree. But I like it. I wouldn't want anything to happen to it. I wouldn't even want it to get scratched. So I'd like you to keep an eye on it. And if you have to go take a leak, get one of your buddies to take over. OK?”

“I'm not the super.”

“Get in some practice. There may be a job for you there.” I squeezed his shoulder a bit harder. “Remember, Rachid, not a scratch, or else...”

“Else what? I'm not doin' nothin'. You can't accuse me of nothin'.”

“I can do anything I like. I'm a cop. Don't forget that.” I ran my hand down his back. “If I put my hand here, on your ass, what'll I find in your back pocket?”

He freed himself quickly. He was on edge. I knew he didn't have anything. I just wanted to be sure.

“I don't have nothin'. I don't touch that shit.”

“I know. You're just a poor little Arab being harassed by a stupid cop, right?”

“Didn't say that.”

“You think it, though. Keep an eye on my car, Rachid.”

B7 was no different than the other blocks. The lobby was filthy, and stank of piss. Someone had thrown a stone at the light bulb and smashed it. And the elevator didn't work. Five floors. Climbing them certainly wasn't taking a stairway to Paradise. Mouloud had called last night and left a message. Surprised at first by the recorded voice, he'd said ‘Hello' a few times, then left a silence, and then spoken his message. “Please, Monsieur Montale, you must come. It's about Leila.”

Leila was the eldest of his three children. The others were Kader and Driss. He might have had more, if his wife, Fatima, hadn't died giving birth to Driss. Mouloud was the immigrant dream personified. He'd been one of the first to be hired for the Fos-sur-Mer site, at the end of 1970.

Fos had been like Eldorado. There was enough work for centuries. They were building a port that would welcome enormous methane gas tankers, factories to produce steel for the whole of Europe. Mouloud was proud of taking part in this adventure. That's what he liked, building, constructing. He'd molded his whole life, and his family, in that image. He'd never forced his children to cut themselves off from other people, to keep clear of the French. All he'd asked is that they avoid bad company. Keep their self-respect. Acquire decent manners. And aim as high as possible. Become integrated in society without denying either their race or their past.

“When we were little,” Leila told me one day, “he made us recite after him:
Allah akbar, la ilah illa Allah, Mohamed rasas Allah, Ayya illa Salat, Ayya illa el Fallah
. We didn't understand a word. But it was nice to hear. It reminded us of all the things he'd told us about Algeria.” It had been a happy time for Mouloud. He'd settled with his family in Port-de-Bouc, between Les Martigues and Fos. They'd been ‘kind to him' at the town hall and he'd soon obtained a nice public housing unit on Avenue Maurice Thorez. The work was hard, and the more Arabs there were, the better it was. That was what the veterans of the naval shipyards, who'd all been taken on at Fos, thought. Italians, mostly Sardinians, Greeks, Portuguese, a few Spaniards.

Mouloud joined the CGT. He was a worker, and he needed to find a family of workers, to understand him, help him, defend him. “This is the biggest,” Gutierrez, the union organizer, had told him. “When the building work's finished,” he'd added, “you can go on a course, learn to handle steel. Stick with us, and you've got a job in the factory for sure.”

Mouloud liked that. He believed it, with a kind of blind faith. Gutierrez believed it too. The CGT believed it. Marseilles believed it. All the surrounding towns believed it, and built one housing project after the other, along with schools and roads, to welcome all the workers expected in this Eldorado. The whole of France believed it. By the time the first ingot of iron was cast, Fos was already nothing more than a mirage. The last great dream of the Seventies. The cruelest of disappointments. Thousands of men out of a job. Mouloud was one of them. But he wasn't discouraged.