Marseille Noir Read online

  As they head back up to the cabin, Miguel discloses a few fragments of a past he would rather have left in darkness forever.

  “It’s a very old story, Pierrot. Does Ouvéa ring a bell?”

  The fisherman just gapes at him.

  “You probably don’t remember. It was over twenty years ago . . . Twenty-three independence activists occupy a cave in New Caledonia. French gendarmes storm the cave on the orders of that tough little doctor—the short guy with a crew cut Chirac sent over to take care of things . . .”

  “Bernard Pons.”

  “Yeah, that’s it. Their demands for a free Caledonia weren’t going to get to first base. Uranium, precious minerals . . . The gendarmes smoked out the cave. It was a bottleneck with a vertical entrance, something like a stone chimney. I was part of the squad that bumped off the activists. Since I was the wiseguy who told the press we didn’t give them a chance, they threw me in the brig . . . When I got out after two weeks, I beat the crap out of the master sergeant. The squad was dissolved, the whole thing was buried. That NCO was in league with two other guys. They’ve got to be the ones who’re after me. They belonged to a movement, New Empire, the new Templars . . . Guys nostalgic for past grandeur.”

  They stop talking, listening for any suspicious noises that might indicate the return of the other guy. The night gets thicker and thicker, only letting through the sound of distant music.

  “You think he’ll be back?”

  “I’d better be ahead of the game. Take him by surprise. These guys aren’t gendarmes anymore. They’re hit men, hired out as mercenaries in hot spots. They miss the good old days—good for them.”

  * * *

  It takes them two days to sniff out the second thug. In Carnoux-en-Provence. He’s hiding out in a convalescent home, wants to wrap up his mission.

  Fearing accomplices inside the home, Miguel suggests they wait till the man returns to the village to finish the job. “Let him stew in his own juice.”

  Times goes by. Nothing. No prowler around. Three days and no weasel to be seen. Miguel agrees to go out fishing. They pick up their nets below the high path along the coast. A bream, a few sardines. As they peer at the houses up there over the sea, they decide to go as far as the local Valparaiso, a good cable’s length from the port, a cascade of white shacks that tumble down to the sea, called by its inhabitants “Tortilla Flat.”

  “You know people there?” Miguel asks.

  The pilot steers his boat over between the rocks and ties it to a buoy. They climb the steep slope in silence. In the gardens and on the terraces built on wooden pilings, people are sitting at tables, joking and chatting. Pierrot describes the thug to them. Nobody ran into anybody asking any questions. At the center of an orange-painted patio, a woman is hanging up her wash and asks about an old lady she hasn’t seen in the village café for a while.

  “Didn’t see her,” Pierrot says.

  She offers them a glass of her homemade chartreuse, a mixture of thyme and herbs. Miguel tastes the concoction.

  “A guy in a black turtleneck. Thin.”

  She shakes her head. “Ask Germaine.”

  She walks them to the hotel two houses farther up, a rendezvous for illegitimate couples. A stout woman with bleached hair opens the door of her den.

  “Oh, it’s you, honey, come on in.”

  They have a stunning view from her place; the virulence of the city loses its glitter. The traps of memory are assigned the same mission: burying the sediments of shame deeper and deeper. Crimes stuffed into a casket with their bones stripped from their flesh. A sea flat as glass, with the buildings of the Roy d’Espagne district on the horizon. Their windows send their ardent lights back to the sunset. Worthy of a lithograph.

  After she hears the description of the ghost from the past, Germaine says she does remember getting a visit awhile ago from two men. They were nosy, a little too insistent. As the madam of a semi-legal brothel, she knows how to hold her tongue.

  “They were turned away by Robert and Mario. You must’ve run into them down below.”

  “They didn’t tell us anything.”

  Pierrot offers the fish to their hostess.

  “You buying info now?”

  Miguel decides to end the investigation right there. He knew he had to get rid of that old debt from the depths of time, had to free himself from it. An ax hanging over you that never falls, it puts a brake on your life. They stay there until nightfall, talking nonstop. Everything becomes easy and nice again.

  Since the darkness is growing thicker and thicker, they leave the boat. It’s not too long a walk back to L’Estaque. At the second crossroads, after they pass a beach and a few scooters with their lights turned off, a rock goes whistling by their ears.

  The stone-throwing kids run away. The village is drifting off to sleep, the last restaurants folding up their tables. The wind is rumbling.

  * * *

  All night long, Miguel sleeps with one eye open, interpreting the slightest little rustling sound, a shutter banging, fearful dogs, the stir of the far-off city slowly burning off its last toxins. In a twisted dream that torments him till dawn, he’s a lab rat trapped in a fenced-off tunnel, and then the waters rush in, green and muddy. Impossible to escape, twenty of them are going to be submerged but nobody screams.

  When he wakes with a start, it’s too late. The enemy is in the fort. Sitting at the kitchen table, a man in black is watching him, a dark revolver with a silencer in front of him on the peeling oilcloth.

  “I could’ve killed you in your sleep. I didn’t do it and I won’t. You’re worthless, you’re not even worth hating . . . You’re living in a dump, surrounded by losers. You—”

  “Shut up.”

  The man gets up and stuffs the Colt back inside his belt. “Just remind yourself there’s no hiding place, no protection. Somebody else will find you.”

  The man leaves the door open and the cool morning breeze drifts into Miguel’s bedroom. With his hands crossed behind his head, he lies in bed and watches a white spider moving slowly toward its prey, a fly that’s not moving anymore, all wrapped up in a deadly sarcophagus.

  The ordinary sounds of day grow louder, everything is falling back into place. The storekeepers are opening up their shops, the school is waiting for the children, and the butcher is unloading carcasses of beef.

  WHAT CAN I SAY?

  by REBECCA LIGHIERI

  Longchamp

  I was born on traverse de l’Observatoire, a street name that will mean nothing to you. Who even remembers there was an astronomical observatory in Marseille once, first in the Accoules quarter and then on the Longchamp plateau?

  Almost a dead-end street, traverse de l’Observatoire stops at boulevard Camille Flammarion. And unless you want to consult Esmée Villalonga, a fortune-teller and tarot reader who’s been at number 27 for years, there’s no reason to go there, not you or anyone else.

  But I was born there, and that’s different. And since my parents never left the three-room apartment where I grew up, naturally I have to go back, even though visiting them is no picnic—a drag, more like.

  There’s nothing much to say about my childhood neighborhood, except that it doesn’t look at all like the idea people have of Marseille when they’ve never been there. Between place Leverrier and the square in front of the Jardin zoologique, you forget pretty fast that the city is a port. The Palais Longchamp looks like an enclave on the Danube with its lawns and cascades, its dome, its colonnades, all green and cool, a thousand miles from Luminy and L’Estaque, not to mention the Quartiers Nord, the North End . . .

  I’m not afraid to say that this “palace” was mine, my domain, my fief, the enchanted kingdom I roamed ever since I was five, under the watchful, sullen eye of my mother, who grew more and more remote. She had better things to do than bring her son to the Jardin zoologique—the name the park kept despite the fact that there hasn’t been the ghost of a bear or a giraffe there since the end of the eighties. />
  From the age of seven on, I went there alone, barely telling anyone I was going out. At any rate, when they weren’t selling their stuff at the markets, my parents would sleep, tired of everything, of getting up at dawn, of loading their van, of working in all kinds of weather; tired of trying to sell their junk: imitation leather jackets, synthetic sweaters, fancy underwear, tight spandex or polyester dresses, a whole load of hideous clothes they wore themselves and dressed their three children in too.

  I’m the oldest. After me, Salvatore, came Libero and Allegra. Even though both my parents grew up in Marseille without actually being born here, they wanted to remain faithful to their Italian origin by this choice of names while showing a certain optimism, a certain confidence in the world and their offspring. Optimism and confidence quickly defeated by reality, judging by the bitter sadness I’ve always seen in them, their ceaseless recriminations, and their indifference to anything that wasn’t directly connected to mere survival: filling their shopping cart, paying their rent, and basta.

  Salvatore—“the savior”—are you kidding? Yes, I did believe in this predestiny, but now that tragedy has struck, now that I killed the only woman I ever loved, I tell myself it would have been better to consult my neighbor Esmée Villalonga so she could have warned me, so she could have reminded me that in Marseille tarot, the Tower always meant doom.

  Yes, but see, in 2001 I’m ten, doom is not in the picture yet, and besides, everything seems new and promising, gleaming under the June sun. The city hasn’t given in to the torpor of summer yet, I’ve put my roller skates on and I’m speeding down the slope that connects the plateau of the Palais Longchamp to its arc de triomphe and the columns that line either side of the cascade. I burst onto the terrace with no problem, lean my elbows over the balustrade in the same movement, and look for my sign, Aquarius, sculpted on the frieze decorating the colonnade. It’s a habit I’ve gotten into, among other childish rituals, to come here and run my fingers over the bas-relief: that muscular boy pouring water out of his vase with a huge splash always seemed a lucky sign, in this spot devoted to water, basins, and grottoes dripping artificial stalactites in the deafening noise of the cascade.

  But today I’m out of luck: a girl’s leaning back against my column and staring at me with a mocking look.

  What can I say? When you’re ten, how do you know you’ve just met the woman of your life, that she’ll be the one and not someone else and your whole life won’t be enough to know and love her—and in my case, that I’ll sentence her to death?

  What can I say? She’s not even pretty the way I think of it at ten: a little plump, vaguely blond, with thick, heavy bangs that veil her blue eyes which don’t have any particular sparkle. She’s dressed the way I am: sweatpants and a T-shirt, black for me and pink for her, a color I hate because I’m a boy. Our resemblance stops at our dress, though: I have dark skin and dark hair, a curly mop on my head that still embarrasses me and I try to control with lots of gel. I have dark eyes that always look like I put on black eye shadow: they’ve given me my share of snide remarks and fights, because no way I’m going to let anybody call me a faggot without a fight.

  What can I say? She’s not my type, and as a matter of fact I don’t care about girls, but on this fine June day, a shiver of pleasure goes through me, a very strong feeling, looking at her there and taking it as a sign that she’s hiding the Aquarius on the frieze from my sight. She starts talking to me with remarkable ease and a touch of disapproval.

  “You’re lucky security didn’t see you. No roller skates allowed here.”

  “I’m not scared of security.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Salvatore, how about you?”

  “Alice.”

  “In wonderland.”

  “You’re only the thousandth guy who’s said that.”

  The conversation could have stopped right there, at that little but unbearable humiliation to my young male pride, but no, contrary to all expectation, we keep on talking, we even spend the afternoon together, running from one end of the park to the other. Alice regularly dashes back to reassure her mother, who’s reading on a bench while keeping an eye on her little brother, a fat baby named Quentin whose existence I instantly forget. I just tell myself—but it’s not the first time—that all families are not alike and there are parents who’re concerned about their children, afraid they might fall or run into the wrong people, while mine seem to have moved beyond parental concern long ago, just busy making ends meet and sleeping off their cheap wine or pastis.

  What can I say? It continued. Alice became my friend, and wonderland was her, without my ever daring to tell her anything about my own wonder.

  We would see each other in the park on Wednesday or Saturday afternoons for years. Together, we ran from the little kiosk selling drinks to the bandstand below; together, we beat countless bushes to flush out skinny cats, bums, or dazed junkies. If only I had known . . .

  Together, we climbed over the balustrade separating the terrace from the monumental fountain and found ourselves wading in the stagnant water between the giant bulls that pull the chariot of the Durance, stamping impatiently with their hooves as if to make a triumphal entry into the city, then they’d run down boulevard Longchamp, take the Canebière, and end their cavalcade at the water’s edge.

  The first time, I’m the one who guides Alice, gives her a hand, helps her climb up on the stony spine of one of the bulls as I’d occasionally been doing myself for a long time. Then we ride together, each on our mount, in the splashes that the wind brings back to us, in the glorious sun and toward a future that I still believe will be as radiant as that lovely day. With a satisfied look, Alice surveys the horned heads of our animals, the green water, the reeds, the moss.

  “You’d think it was the Camargue.”

  “You’ve been there before?”

  “Sure, lots of times. You haven’t?”

  I never go anywhere: my parents don’t have the time and my school, Leverrier, doesn’t go in for class trips. Too bad. I’ll catch up later on with Alice and our kids.

  We keep growing. At eleven, we enter sixth grade in the same junior high, Chartreux, but we make sure never to be seen together. When I run into her, her smile, that marvelous smile as frank as it is contagious, becomes evasive and distant, while her look goes right through me, even if she vaguely waves to me every once in a while.

  That doesn’t stop us from meeting from time to time, to explore the grottoes or the thickets, drink between the gilded caryatids of the Wallace fountain, or sit on the lawns next to the zoo where park security never comes after us with their strident whistles.

  We keep growing, and growing up separates us. One day in January when strong winds are blowing through the city, I see her huddled up on the steps of the monumental staircase. I go down to join her and we sit next to each other for the last time in many years to come.

  “What’re you doing here?”

  “Waiting for my girlfriends.”

  The wind tangles her hair, beats it down on her face and mine. She’s changed the way she does her hair, freeing her forehead from the childish bangs that had made such an impression on me four or five years before, but she still has her enviable cheeks, and the mistral is bringing out their delicate pink. With a politeness that makes my heart sink, she asks about school: “What’re you going to do after eighth grade?”

  “Dunno. Maybe vocational school, become an electrician. I think. You?”

  “Well . . . high school.”

  A new gust of wind brings us together and I breathe in, desperately, her dizzying girl smell, all freshness and lavender. From the pocket of her pretty navy-blue peacoat, a thousand miles from the loud down jackets my parents sell, she pulls out a playing card.

  “Look, this just flew into my face. The wind brought it.”

  “What is it?”

  “A tarot card. I’ll give it to you.”

  Then she sees her friends and charges down
the steps to meet them. All I can do is watch her gloomily as she leaves the palace and my life. If I had an ounce of sense, I’d double back to traverse de l’Observatoire and ask Esmée Villalonga to interpret that card Alice and the wind have drawn for me. But I do not. The card shows a crenelated tower with flames coming out of it. It also seems to suggest a fall, but how could I see my own fall coming when I’m only fifteen with plenty of rage in my heart—la rabbia, not to mention the rest: arrogance, confidence, and the urge to fight and make it?

  I’m sixteen, then seventeen, eighteen, twenty. I didn’t last long in school: I stopped as soon as I could, left my parents and the three-room apartment on traverse de l’Observatoire for a studio at the other side of the park, on rue Lacépède. I get by, doing odd jobs here and there, and mostly I do a lot of dealing: grass, coke, MDMA, a little of everything in fact. I adapt to the market, to the needs of my customers. I choose them carefully so I don’t have to cope with real druggies—they disgust me and they’re an endless pain in the ass.

  In fact, the more time passes, the more bread I make from drugs. I must have a flair for business because I always manage to find the best product and deal it to the right people, the ones who aren’t going to bug me with whining phone calls at three a.m. or trigger a raid on my studio. Its windows look out on the park, my wonderland of long ago, today disenchanted by the disaffection of my queen.

  I go out, a lot. And I have as many girls as I like: sluts, not shy at all, but also bourgeois girls who remind me of Alice without being her. I fascinate them with my tough-guy demeanor, my dark curls, my eyes that always look like they’re lined with kohl, and the casual way I pick them up at those parties where everybody waits for me because I dispense pleasure and dance, white powder, crystals, and multicolored, monogrammed pills.

  If I didn’t have moments of solitude where I can have a smoke at my window, waiting for the growl of the tigers, the cries of the monkeys, or the squawking of the parrots from the nearby zoo, I might lose myself completely in that futile life—a life not so different from my parents’, when you come right down to it.