Marseille Noir Read online

  We lived at the bottom of the path leading up to Roucas Blanc, almost on rue d’Endoume, in a little dead end of gray tar, next to a plumber’s workshop where I would sometimes play with the boss’s son, a little blond kid named Denis Fornasero. On the other side there was a grocery store run by a gentle, mute Algerian couple, Leila and Saïd Bijaoui, who didn’t have any children; I learned later that they’d had a son who was killed in the Algerian War. Maybe that’s why their eyes looked so very sad. The Malatestas lived right across the street, as did the Fabrizios (their son René was more Ange’s friend than mine and he sometimes invited Ange over); there was also the Ollives, the Nicolaïs, the Mattéis, the Lacépèdes, and the Pagès—all families I knew less well, since they didn’t have any kids my age. A little farther toward boulevard Tellène, there was the Girard family. Their son François was ten years older than me. He played in the Endoume soccer club and was pretty good. He called himself Francis, I never knew why. A good-looking guy, blond with light eyes, who could get any girl he wanted. He kind of fascinated us, Ange and me.

  I never knew exactly what the mental problems of the four Joes were, but I remember that one afternoon when we were playing in our street (Thursday was then the day off from school), Ange told me, looking dejected, that the day before, when he happened to be alone at home with his sisters a little before their mother got back, one of them had suddenly started to crawl over the dining room rug, crying and spitting like a cat, while another one danced naked and another meticulously tore apart the leaves of their plants, humming a tune of Luis Mariano’s under the watchful eyes of the last one, who was sucking her thumb and stroking her hair. When their mother got there, she called an ambulance and three of the sisters left the house. So only one remained that day: I’ll call her Josette for convenience, though I’m not absolutely sure she was really the one.

  Josette liked me and so did the three other Jo sisters, although she never remembered my name. And in fact, since the four sisters were interchangeable in my eyes, I’d be better off using an original grammatical form when I talk about Josette, fusing the singular with the plural: “Josettes liked me,” for example. Or, “Josette liked me, although they never remembers my name.” However it may be, this girl was like a condensed version of the four, as if Jocelyne, Josiane, Josephine, and Josette were suddenly put together in one body, which I had decided, with all the confidence of my nine years of age, to call Josette.

  * * *

  At the time I was going to the elementary school on rue Candolle, on the other side of rue d’Endoume—just like Ange, but we weren’t in the same class. As for the Jo sisters, they were old enough to go to lycée (at that time high school and junior high were combined), but I’m not sure their condition allowed them to attend school at all. Today, I no longer remember. What I do remember is that a little later that same Thursday afternoon, I found myself alone with Josette. Her father was at a construction site, her mother probably at the hairdresser’s, the three other sisters in the psychiatric unit of La Timone Hospital, and the brother had gone to his neighbor René Fabrizio’s to look at his collection of Norev car models. (René was a tall, skinny kid with pale skin and a freckled face who spoke very fast and was crazy about cars.) My parents weren’t home either. My mother was out that day visiting her sister, who’d just had her appendix removed at La Conception Hospital. As for my father, he was rarely there anyway.

  So I was alone at the Malatesta’s, with Josette. I was reading The Secret of the Unicorn while she was silently playing with her hair on the flowery couch in the living room with a magazine she wasn’t reading on her naked knees. She was staring at me in a strange, slightly sorrowful way. I pretended not to see anything when she slowly raised her dress to the top of her thighs, which were brown and slender. From the corner of my eyes, I caught a glimpse of the white, scalloped bottom of her panties. I didn’t react when she walked over to me either, swaying her hips in an exaggerated way. But I was vaguely terrified: she was tall, and I was only a shy, embarrassed little boy. She kept on twisting the long locks of her shiny black hair between her fingers. She sat down right next to me. She smelled nice: shampoo and milk soap. I pretended to go on reading Tintin, and persisted in not reacting when she began to cry silently, murmuring some words I couldn’t quite understand. Then she stroked my thigh. The Bird Brothers were trying to kill Tintin in the underground passages of Moulinsart, but I wasn’t really paying attention to that; I was just mechanically turning the pages as if nothing was happening. Josette put her head on my shoulder while continuing to stroke me through my shorts. She murmured other words that I couldn’t understand. Her hand slipped into the opening of my shorts. It was soft. I felt my little penis rising. She took it carefully between her fingers, kept on stroking it gently, and then leaned over toward it, surrounding it in a humid sheath. I closed my eyes and forced myself not to move an inch.

  That’s when Ange came in. Josette jumped back and began to whimper. Then she sprang up and ran into her room. As for me, I was paralyzed, like a rabbit caught in the headlights of a car. But I did have the presence of mind to drop The Secret of the Unicorn on my thighs. I’d been squeezing it against my chest, right above Josette’s curly hair. Ange froze and gave me a dark look that scared me a little. I had never seen his eyes like that, intense and hostile at the same time. In fact, I had never known him to be so serious; usually, anything would make him laugh. I was confused about that look I’d never seen before; he was suddenly rising above his age, our age: it was a grown-up look, not the look of a nine-year-old child. Then he put his keys down on the little table at the entrance and said nonchalantly, “What’s her problem now?”—and without waiting for an answer, he became a little boy again and told me about René Fabrizio’s collection of Norevs.

  * * *

  At that time Endoume was a village. I’m talking about East Endoume, the Roucas Blanc–Saint-Victor–Corderie side, not to be confused with West Endoume on the Corniche side, which was the hip part of the neighborhood. In fact, Marseille was less a city than a patchwork of villages, each one with a clearly defined identity. In general, each of these villages ignored the existence of the others. It was useless to speak of La Belle de Mai to the residents of Sainte-Marguerite, of Canet to the people of Endoume (East or West), of Montredon to the people of L’Estaque, of the Aygalades to the people of Saint-Barnabé: at best these were places where they’d never set foot, and at worst they considered it useless, even degrading, to go there. Only the Canebière and the Vieux-Port, which made up the tiny city center of what was nonetheless the second largest city in France, were common to everyone—or almost everyone.

  A quarter of a century later, that hadn’t changed much. The village of East Endoume still had its own character, the small shopkeepers hadn’t yet seen their shops bought up by national chains, and life there was rather pleasant. The residents of the little dead-end street, however, were not the same. I still lived there, but alone since my mother died; I never got married. On the other hand, the Malatestas had moved away long ago, like most of the other neighbors except for the Fabrizios. Their son René had the same passion for cars he had as a child, and now worked as a sales executive for Renault in La Capelette.

  As for me, I had taken over from my father. It was the end of the nineties. Around twenty years earlier, there had been the famous “French connection,” which a movie with Gene Hackman had made famous all over the world. The Endoume mob was active in it, particularly our neighbor François Girard, a.k.a. Francis, a.k.a. Le Blond or Hay-Head. He was still a handsome guy, still a lady-killer, and still loved soccer. But at the very beginning of the eighties, he’d been accused of ordering the assassination of a well-known judge who’d had the unfortunate idea of digging a little too deep into the scandals linked to this French connection, and he got life. They made a movie about that too.

  The mob was changing a lot during those years. Besides, at some point there was no longer a single, unified “mob,” just bosses
fighting each other. Their methods were more violent than before and summary executions were the rule. The great upheavals at work in society at the time, the sudden rise of laissez-faire economics, the increasingly aggressive sales techniques, the way the workforce was managed—management, as they said, using the American word with a French accent—and the first notions of “flexibility,” “adaptability,” and “downsizing” that would flourish after 2000 were nothing else but the good old system of shameless exploitation of the most vulnerable. A brief parenthesis of four decades marked by concern for working people, roughly from the Liberation to the second election of Mitterrand, had more or less put a brake on the system, but now all that was washing over the deepest levels of society, multiplied a hundredfold and in the most violent ways, in the small, medium, and of course biggest spheres of organized crime. In Marseille, the Corsicans and the Arabs, who at first had more or less agreed to divide the territory (the Corsicans downtown with the slot machines and the old mafia-like system for bars, restaurants, and prostitution; the Arabs in the North End with the flourishing drug business—and prostitution too), were now becoming greedier, and each tried to take over market shares from the territories and businesses of the other, which led to endless gangland killings. You’d think the young generations—mine was already over the hill—had seen too many ultraviolent American movies. I was becoming an old schmuck: my credo was, It was better in the old days. I was barely over thirty, but I was already thinking of taking some sort of early retirement.

  When I talked about it around me, I was made to understand that it was not wanted. But I kept at it and was told to talk to Raymond Burr.

  Raymond Burr was the actor who played Robert T. Ironside in the 1970s TV series: a paralyzed cop in his wheelchair, surrounded by his sidekicks—a young dark-haired guy, a blond girl, and a black guy, all neatly dressed with well-combed hair. Raymond Burr was also the nickname of a baron of the Damiani branch of the powerful Altieri family, who ran part of the city. Raymond Burr was mostly in charge of the Endoume-Corderie-Catalans sector, going up toward Notre-Dame de la Garde. He was said to be utterly devoid of scruples. Some claimed his nickname came from his temperament, others said it was because he was paralyzed and in a wheelchair, which still others denied. Me, I had no idea: I’d never met him.

  They gave me an appointment with him on a Monday at six p.m. in the back room of Chez Fernand, a bar that was then on the corner of rue Perlet, not far from the former movie theater, Bompard, where I had seen Planet of the Apes as a child and a whole lot of noir films—including Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Deuxième Souffle, with Lino Ventura, which I saw twice. It never stopped playing because of its last scene, which took place nearby, almost at the corner of rue d’Endoume and boulevard de la Corderie, right at the beginning of rue des Lices.

  It was only the beginning of June, but it was already very hot. I had walked there and was sweating in my shirtsleeves, with my beige blazer in hand. When I opened the door of the bar, Fernand nodded hello and pointed with his thumb to a door that said Private. I nodded back and went into the bathroom first. Splashed cold water over my face. Then I put on my blazer: I was known in the profession as an elegant, clean-looking man and I wasn’t going to start looking slovenly just because it was ninety-one lousy degrees in the shade. I took a comb out of my inside pocket, grazing the small metal Jesus I’d taken with me as a precaution, and straightened my hair. When the result seemed more or less acceptable, I went back to the bar without looking at Fernand and opened the door marked Private.

  Two guys were standing there, cigarettes in their mouths, near an antique chest of drawers that could have belonged to my great-aunt Thérèse, the one who’d lived in the colonies for twenty years and was involved in diamond trafficking in the Congo. A big fan was turning, bringing a few breaths of welcome coolness. I knew the two guys: Milou and Doumé, two inseparable gunmen, one tall and thin, the other short and fat. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, you might say. More precisely Emile Leccia, a.k.a. Milou, also The Radish (I never knew why), and Dominique Franceschi, a.k.a. Doumé (nobody ever took the trouble of finding a real nickname for him). They looked at me without moving a muscle.

  There was also a third person, sitting in the shadow: Raymond Burr, no doubt. I noted the two big metal tires of the wheelchair, which possibly explained the origin of his nickname. He moved forward a little and his face came into the light. He was bald and puffy, dressed completely in black. A character from a Scorsese film.

  “So, you want to hang it up?” he said in a weak voice, a little too soft, with what seemed to me a slightly fake Corsican accent.And he shot me an intense, dark look, in complete contradiction to the tone he’d just used—the look of a Dalmatian eagle, the nickname for Josip Skoblar, the greatest shooter ever to play soccer for the Olympique de Marseille.

  Except that the guy facing me wasn’t Dalmatian but Sicilian. My eyes widened.

  “Ange?”

  “Ah . . . so you do recognize me,” he said slowly, still with the same fake accent. “That’s good.”

  It was a statement of fact, both satisfied and surprised. And yet, no, I certainly wouldn’t have recognized him without the look he’d just given me, exactly the same look he’d given me twenty-five years earlier in his living room, just after his sister Josette or whatever her name was had introduced me to forbidden pleasures for the first time. How could I have recognized the slim kid with a high voice who liked to laugh in this fat bald guy slumped in a wheelchair? I was stunned.

  “Go see if it’s nice out,” he said curtly to the two thugs who hadn’t taken their eyes off my face or their cigs out of their mouths.

  The Radish and Doumé left slowly, with a walk a bit too studied to be natural. I knew them well, one couldn’t make up for the other: both equally violent and simpleminded. Total morons. I turned my head to Ange. His expression had changed: less hard, but not the like the child I’d known. A look that had seen it all, slightly weary, both disillusioned and determined. But he still had his long black eyelashes.

  “What happened?” I asked, pointing to his wheelchair.

  He told me disdainfully that when he was twenty-five and still living with his parents near La Pointe-Rouge, he wanted to show off for a few pals and especially a few girls—among them, one he really liked despite her excessive blondness and her unfortunate tendency to chew gum with her mouth open. On a July day, before the whole little group, he dived off the rocky peak of the Saména inlet. But he’d misjudged the depth of the water and crashed on the rocks that were sticking out of the water a few inches. He’d been stuck in a wheelchair ever since.

  “No luck,” he concluded. “But what can you do? Two years later I married the blonde with the chewing gum. I taught her to keep her mouth shut and made her go back to her natural hair color. In fact, her hair is as dark as mine. Well, like mine used to be,” he smiled, stroking his bald pate.

  I didn’t know what to say. “And . . . your sisters, they’re okay?”

  He gave me another dark, implacable look and remained silent for a few seconds. I withstood his gaze without blinking. We were right in the middle of the final scene of a spaghetti western; all you needed was the harmonica. Finally, he spat out: “Two committed suicide, one’s locked up.”

  I pretended to think about this. “Oh God, no . . . But . . . there’s one left, right?”

  He nodded slowly. “You got it. Yours.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Josiane.”

  I shook my head and knitted my brows. I didn’t understand at all. “What do you mean, Josiane? And why ‘mine’? What’re you talking about?”

  He sighed. “You want to hang it up, right? Let’s say that’s a go. But under certain conditions. Okay,” he added, “I’m thirsty. Pastis?” He rolled his wheelchair over to a low piece of furniture and opened its door, revealing about a dozen bottles. “Ricard, Casanis, 51? I even have some Pec, if you like.”

  “51, thanks. Ange, I don’t understan
d a thing you’re saying.”

  “Ice?”

  “Sure. Ange, could you be more explicit, please?”

  He filled up the glasses and motioned to me to help myself. We clinked glasses. The ice cubes gave off their delightful little crystalline noise.

  “It’s been a long time, right?” he said, smiling. “How long? Twenty-five years?”

  “Around that, yeah. Here’s to you.”

  “How’s your mother?”

  “Died ten years ago. Cancer. How about you, your parents?”

  “Same thing. One year apart. Cancer too. I know you never left the street. René Fabrizio’s still there?”

  “Yeah, he sells cars. Predictable. I think his dream is to run for city council.” We began to laugh. “But how about you?” I went on. “How did you end up working for the Damiani-Altieris?”

  “It’s a long story. I’ll tell you about it some other time. Anyway, I’m here. And I’m the one who decides whether you retire or not,” he declared in a harsh tone.

  I didn’t answer. The conversation was taking a different turn.

  “I don’t want you to leave the business,” he said, more gently. “We need reliable, discreet personnel. You’re the perfect fit. But if that’s what you really want, I’ll see what I can do. Let’s say it’s in memory of the little street we grew up on. I trust you, I know you won’t go blabbing your head off if you retire. But there’s a price to pay.”

  I could see where he was heading. “And that price is . . . ?”

  “I told you: Josiane.”

  I pretended not to understand.

  “I know,” he sighed, “you never could tell my sisters apart. Not you or anyone else, for that matter—not even my mother, sometimes. And as for my father, forget it. Everybody called them the Four Joes. When I heard that, I used to think of the four Daltons in Lucky Luke, and since one of them is called Joe, I couldn’t hear anyone talk about them without instantly having the image of Joe Dalton in front of my eyes, the little nasty, nervous guy. And I felt for them. But anyway. I was the only one who could tell them apart. For me, they didn’t look all that much alike.”