Marseille Noir Read online

  Sometimes I take the card Alice gave me years ago out of my wallet. I finally learned, without even trying, that it was the sixteenth Major Arcana card of Marseille tarot—in other words, the Tower, the most frightening card in the deck, the one that foreshadows the end. But when you’re twenty, who can believe your end is near or even possible? I am immortal.

  I lead a dangerous life all right, but I think I don’t take useless risks. I never re-up in the projects, where they draw a gun on you at the drop of a hat for five kilos of grass or two thousand euros; I have regular customers in pretty unexpected spots, a village in the hills over Nice and another north of here in the Drôme: I do business with two fifty-somethings who look like ordinary folks, even if I suspect them of running their own drug deals that go way beyond the borders of the region. The less I know about them, the better.

  Among other precautions, I take care to remain anonymous. Nobody knows me by my real name, since I call myself Ousmane, Nassim, or Farès: the bourgeois boys are flattered to buy their shit from an Arab. They feel like they’re slumming it, like they have a foot in the North End through their dealer. They’d be very disappointed if I confessed that all I know about La Busserine or the Micocouliers projects is what I read in the papers, just like them—just like all those assholes excited by Kalashnikovs and Škorpions but who’ll never get to see one up close.

  I’m twenty. There’s nothing exciting or glorious about my life, but all things considered, I like it better than my parents’: I blow more money than they’ll ever have, I don’t have schedules to follow or loans to strangle me. I deal drugs, and if that doesn’t exactly open up professional possibilities or prospects for the future, strictly speaking, nothing prevents me from transforming myself later in life, when I’ve put a little bread aside. We’ll see what turns up.

  * * *

  One ordinary evening, I show up at Maël’s, a regular customer. He’s just a little older than I am and I like him. His parents have a beautiful house in La Pointe-Rouge and a boat somewhere or other, so they go sailing six months a year, leaving the key to the house with their son and feeding his bank account so generously that poor Maël spends his time throwing parties in Mom and Dad’s triplex and flunking all his exams in architecture school.

  He opens the door and his face lights up when he sees me. That’s the way Maël is, always happy, always in a good mood, always polite and considerate. For him, I’m Farès, and we do business quickly in one of the rooms upstairs. He and his pals live on coke and MDMA and pay cash on the spot—never any fuck-ups.

  “You want a drink? Anything you need is downstairs.”

  I appreciate his not throwing me out as soon as the transaction is over—after all, we’re not buddies. I suspect he’s one of those guys who thinks I’m a big shot in the projects and he enjoys showing me off a little at his parties.

  “You didn’t tell anybody who I am, right?”

  “Relax. I’ll say I know you from volleyball.”

  Yes, Maël drinks like a sieve, smokes a joint as soon as he gets up, and snorts line after line, but he’s healthy as hell—plays sports and eats organic.

  In the rooms on the ground floor, the party’s going strong. People are sprawled out all over, the ashtrays are full and they’re smoking like mad. Like all parties everywhere in the world, the girls are the only ones dancing, slowly, and without much enthusiasm. One of them turns around when I come in and stops rolling her hips: it’s Alice, and she comes right over to me.

  “Salvatore! Hey, what a surprise! What’re you doing here?”

  I can understand why she’s surprised; so am I. Not about being here, but about her recognizing me, coming up to me, wanting to talk to me instead of acting remote the way she has been for the past four or five years on the rare occasions when I’ve bumped into her between Chartreux and Cinq-Avenues.

  “I’m Farès, not Salvatore: you must be confusing me with someone else.”

  As she stares at me wide-eyed, I drag her toward an empty bedroom.

  “You’d do me a favor if you didn’t tell anybody what my real name is.”

  She bursts into joyous laughter. “Okay, now I know who you are: you’re Maël’s dealer. He told me you were going to come.”

  “What an asshole!”

  “Nothing to worry about with me. You got any coke?”

  “Go see your pal about that.”

  She laughs again, as if I’m the funniest guy in the world, while I look her over from head to toe. She’s become slender, without losing her childish cheeks or rounded arms—not to mention an ample chest. She follows my look with amusement, adjusts her little top to cover her cleavage, and leaves me standing there.

  I spend the rest of the evening watching her. She goes from one group to the other, relaxed and easy, with a glass in her hand and a cig in her lips. Given the size of her pupils, I suspect she went upstairs to do a few lines in Maël’s parents’ big bathroom, where the action seems to be. I don’t care: that shit, I sell it, I don’t use it, and this is the secret to my relative prosperity.

  From time to time Alice comes over, talks to me, smiles, and exchanges banalities that make me feel good. I don’t know if I can be fully objective about her, but I find her a hell of a lot classier than the other girls, less vampish, less zonked out: she doesn’t kiss her girlfriends on the mouth, doesn’t dance like a striptease artist, doesn’t throw up in the sink, and doesn’t pull me aside to assure me of her eternal friendship with that sentimentality of drunks and cokeheads that I’ve grown to loathe.

  When it’s five a.m. I finally decide to split. I don’t want to know how she’s going to end the evening, nor with whom. She catches up to me at the door: “Salvatore, wait a minute!”

  “What?”

  “Leave me your phone number.”

  “Okay, if you don’t give it to anyone else.”

  “You really think I’m so stupid?”

  At that, we part, and I go back home on my scooter, taking a few one-way streets the wrong way in the pink, glorious dawn, riding alongside the Corniche, passing les Catalans, the port, the Canebière, and ending up at the Cinq-Av’ café, where I have a double espresso and a croissant—to celebrate the sunrise and play the film of last night over and over in my head, Alice’s attentions to me, her smile, her breasts just begging to escape from her shirt, her way of dancing without showing off, aware of her effect on me. Alice . . .

  * * *

  Four days later she calls me. She wants some coke.

  “I’m sick of going through Maël when I want something. I’d rather deal directly with you. You understand, right?”

  I understand, I totally understand, and I tell her to meet me at the Cinq-Av’. I’m a little disappointed, but at least it’s a start: we need to reconnect, be like we were when we were childhood friends.

  Before long I’ve become her official dealer, but I must say, to her credit, that she doesn’t treat me that way. Every time she buys a gram of powder or crystal from me, she takes her time, we have a drink together, talk about everything under the sun, about what she’s studying—literature, with little conviction—about her younger brother, the music she likes, the movies she’s just seen. I share less about myself, but still, little by little, I tell her things: my parents, Italy, that Piedmont village where I spent every August from zero to sixteen, smack—something I absolutely don’t want to touch—and my desire for a life that won’t look like the ones I see sinking into the mud all around me.

  What can I say, except that the promise we made when we were ten—unformulated, maybe not understood at all—is now being fully kept? The more I see Alice, the more I’m convinced that I was born to love her, her and no one else. I love the natural, spontaneous way she always is with me; I love her veiled beauty, her gray eyes, her straight hair with very slight curls in it, her fresh cheeks and the click of the bracelets on her forearms.

  I also love that other Alice, the one she occasionally reveals when she looks at me with a
n almost wild despair and then pulls herself back immediately. Those days when her lips tremble slightly, when tears come to her eyes, wiped away too quickly for me to mention them, for me to ask her, But what’s wrong, Alice? Alice, please tell me . . .

  All I do is stiffen in my seat and look tough because I know she likes that—it’s my Italian bad-boy side. I still have the Tower in my wallet but I don’t think much about it. I should take it upon myself to burst the tight framework of our relationship, so strangely chaste, and try to learn more about that sadness, about what’s driving her to take more and more drugs—coke, grass, and ecstasy.

  One day, I happen to see three parallel scars on her wrist.

  “What’s that? You into scarification now?”

  “Not anymore. I used to be.”

  “What do you get out of that?”

  “Dunno. It’s a teenage thing, you know: lots of girls do it. It relieves tension. After, you feel better: you can go on again.”

  “What tension?”

  “Don’t worry about it. It’s over, I don’t do it anymore, okay?”

  A short time later, she asks me if I can get her some smack. And I can, of course.

  “But what do you want smack for? Nobody does it anymore, you know.”

  “All the more reason. I just want to try it. They say it’s not bad for a coke comedown.”

  “Except you’ll have a smack downer and that can be mean.”

  “Fine, can you get me some or not?”

  “Okay. But I want to be with you the first time you do it.”

  So she has her first sniff at my place. I tested it in advance, me who never takes anything, just to see if it’s cut with too much crap. I’ve never trusted heroin. It’s not something to party with, it’s not something you have a nice evening with. Besides, Maël and his pals from Roucas-Blanc, La Pointe-Rouge, and the Périer heights never ask me for it. I have just a few customers who buy some, old people who look like they can handle it; otherwise, I wouldn’t sell them any.

  What can I say? I give in. I should tell Alice to stick with coke or go get her shit somewhere else. I should tell her: Come on, let’s get the car, I’m taking you to Italy. We’ll walk around Vieux Nice, we’ll swim on the beach at Menton and then, you’ll see, it’s the Roya Valley, you’ll like it; we go over the Tende Pass, we go back down to Torino. I’ll buy you ice cream on Piazza San Carlo, and then, I know a spot, a spot just for you, Alice, an inn under the pines in the mountains, one of my uncles runs it, come on . . .

  But I don’t say anything and she snorts the line I laid out for her on a corner of the table, leans back on the cushions of my folding couch, and says: “Wow! God, Salvatore, it’s too good, you should try it! No comparison to coke!”

  And then she gets very talkative because of the magic powder coursing through her veins. She talks a good part of the night, about everything, about adult life: she’s afraid she won’t be able to fit in, she always feels like she’s somewhere else . . .

  “What can I tell you, Salvatore? Everything’s fine but nothing is.”

  The midsummer heat has dropped, it’s nice out, we stand at the window and smoke in the summer night, the way I’ve done so by myself for years. I put my hand on her scarred wrist to quiet her and my fingers look for the little serrations of her three scars. “Shhh, be quiet for a minute, you’ll hear them.”

  “Hear what?”

  “The animals in the zoo. They howl all night.”

  She stares at me, stupefied. Unlike coke, heroin shrinks the size of the pupils, which makes her eyes look much lighter, astonishingly blue in her pale face.

  “Hey, you’re nuts, the zoo’s closed. The animals left a long time ago!”

  “That’s what you think. Just listen.”

  She plays the game and listens hard in the direction of the chestnut trees in the park. Her face lights up and she smiles, like I just gave her a priceless gift. “Holy shit, you’re right! I can hear them! I heard a lion! And a bird!”

  “That must be a parrot, the birdcage is full of them.”

  What can I say? After that midsummer’s night dream impossible to relate, that moment when I thought I’d gotten her to understand that life is sad for everybody but it’s up to her to reenchant it a little, I keep selling her dope: less and less coke and more and more heroin.

  She moves to shooting up, the first time under my guidance, in my studio on rue Lacépède, but the next times without me, and without my being able to say or do anything.

  She changes, she gets thinner, loses her childish plumpness and the luster of her hair and the sparkle in her eyes. When I try to put a brake on her intake, she smiles: “Please, Salvatore.”

  “Alice, it’s just that I don’t want to see you destroy yourself. And it’s my fault too!”

  “Nothing’s your fault. If you weren’t here, I’d get it somewhere else. It’s just that I need it, that’s all—to get through a rough spot.”

  She always says that: it’s temporary, she’s going to stop. Unfortunately, I know druggies too well, their promises, their lies, and all their lousy little betrayals.

  Since I ration her powder and cut it before selling it to her, she finds another dealer. And given the quantities she needs now, I suspect she’s doing some shady things to get the bread. She stops going to classes. “That doesn’t lead anywhere anyway.”

  We keep seeing each other. Sometimes she comes to shoot up at my place and I don’t say anything because these days, it’s the only chance I have of spending a little time with her.

  “Alice, don’t you see you’re fucking up?”

  “And you, you’re not fucking up? Don’t you think you’re going to get busted one day?”

  “It’s not the same thing.”

  “Where are you going, Salvatore, with your crappy little drug business? You’re going to do this till you’re how old?”

  “Yeah, but at least I’m not zonked out half the time.”

  “Right, you’re clean, you’re lucid, you’re in control. And where does that get you?”

  I’m not up to fighting with her, I give up right away. “Dunno, Alice. I just want . . . you to be okay. Less sad.”

  “But what if I want to be sad? What if being sad is what makes me who I am?”

  I should laugh in her face and hug her, but I don’t dare. Her absence of desire for me is too blatant to ignore. I want her, but she’s the last woman in the world I would try to force myself on. I want her to love me, to admit that we’re made for each other and the Palais Longchamp is the kingdom where we could reign for centuries to come.

  All I do is watch the slow, methodical destruction of her body and soul, very much in accordance with what the Arcana number sixteen card predicted. Esmée Villalonga could warn me against it, if only I went back to traverse de l’Observatoire from time to time. But I don’t, not anymore. My parents are losing it and vote far right now, not to mention that they’ve found their own weapon of mass destruction in liquor and I myself have enough destruction and waste to spare with Alice.

  Still, one day when we’re having coffee at the Cinq-Av’ café and she’s about to leave, I grab her by the arm, I look her in the eye, and forcing myself to control the trembling of my voice, even adding a hint of mockery to save us both from melodrama, I say: “Don’t forget, you’re the woman of my life.”

  She gets out of it with a little joke that saves us both from embarrassment, but I know she believes me.

  Strangely enough, it’s from that day on that she seems to get back on her feet. First I’m glad to see her put a bit of flesh on her bones, regain her curves and her color. She doesn’t ask me to for dope anymore, she doesn’t come shoot up at my place anymore, and our conversations in the café are evasive and cheerful. I’d be fully reassured if those same conversations weren’t totally empty and pointless, as if she’d retreated to a place even more remote than where heroin took her. I’d be fully reassured if the look in her eyes wasn’t so frightening, despite her beau
tiful smile, her cheeks full and pink again, and that sensational chest. Alice . . .

  And then what had to happen happens: the network of my quiet middle-aged guy in the Drôme is dismantled by the cops. I have to split, get rid of my cell phones, close my pad, and hit the road to Italy, the same one I would’ve liked so much to show Alice. I’m going to hole up in the country at my uncle’s inn, wait till they forget about me, and see what happens.

  Before leaving, I still have time to hide my stock—weed, coke, ecstasy, a little smack. You never know: when I come back, I might need it. On place Henry Dunant, there’s a fence that’s easy to climb, and bingo, there I am again in the green paradise of my childhood, not far from the terrace and the colonnade where I first met Alice. I bury the shit pretty deep under the thickets by the old observatory, in a place where in another time my queen and I had buried a whole treasure of marbles, taking an oath to come back and dig it out when we were all grown up. A forgotten oath, like so many others.

  * * *

  What can I say? Time goes by in the Piedmont, just like everywhere else. I work a little for my uncle. He’s definitely not as much of an asshole as my father, but still. When I was in such a rush to get rid of my cell phones, I lost all my contacts, Alice’s among them. At the time it seemed best, but six months later I’m beginning to miss her, and Marseille too.

  Since the cops don’t seem to have traced anything back to me, since nobody bothered my parents, since my studio on rue Lacépède wasn’t searched, I finally return, and on the very first night I have a smoke at my window, my eyes lost in the swaying foliage of the chestnut trees, waiting in vain for the cries of the lions and parrots.

  The next day and the days after that, I spend hours at the café where we used to hang out, but there’s no sign of Alice. The waiters I ask about her don’t even know who I’m talking about. They’re new, they don’t know her any more than they know me, and there’s no lack of pretty girls with brown hair and blue eyes in Marseille.