Marseille Noir Read online

  That day, he explained to me why we in Marseille hated the Parc des Princes.

  “Nothing to do with the Paris-Saint-Germain soccer team, son. Nothing. It goes back to 1927, see, at the time when the most popular sport was bike racing. That’s why this stadium is called Vélodrome—velo’s short for velocipede, you know. People came from all over to see the guys racing on the track. They were stars! In Paris, in the Vel’ d’Hiv, you had the Six Day race. It lasted all night and Paris celebrities flocked to see it—Gabin, Mistinguett, all the stars. You had to see and be seen at the Six Days . . .”

  “What about the bikers, did they race for six whole days?”

  “No, they took turns. They only raced evenings and nights. Everything stopped at sunrise.”

  André sighed and tossed his butt aside.

  “But for the hard-core fans, the real show was the middle-distance race. The guys used to bike at top speed behind motorcycles that droned like mad. People called them ‘the butterflies.’ The middle-distance racers were really crazy. They went up to sixty miles an hour or more, faster and faster, until one of them finally cracked and picked up his foot. You see the stakes? How do you know when and how to stop? . . . The guys who couldn’t do it got killed.”

  “Like Gustave Gamay?”

  He looked disappointed. “How do you know?”

  I turned around and pointed to the name above the entrance. “It’s the name of the section.”

  He burst out laughing, then his laughter degenerated into a fit of coughing that echoed along the rows of seats. “You’re a little wiseguy, that’s what you are.”

  He shot me a hard punch in the shoulder and it hurt. He’d been a boxer for sure.

  “Yes, Ganay. He was the best middle-distance racer. A daredevil who worked as a stagehand at the Alcazar. That guy was no chicken. And then one night in Paris at the Parc des Princes, he went too far too fast. Like a poker player who raises the ante without the cards. A last bluff. He slipped under his bike and the butterfly dragged him all around the track. You can just see the victory lap . . .”

  And so, according to Dédé, it was from that day on that we in Marseille hated the Parc des Princes. Why shouldn’t we? It had robbed our champion cyclist from us. I didn’t dare ask if Ganay took steroids.

  André let his eyes wander over the hills again. Under it all, he seemed like a sad guy. He turned to me and looked me straight in the eye. I saw something like reproach.

  “It was an accident, understand . . . An accident.”

  It was cold, but I ordered lemon ice cream anyway.

  * * *

  The last time André came, I could tell it would be the last. He was shivering despite the fact that spring was coming in. It must have been close to the beginning of March. The sun was early. Dédé’s features had hollowed out and his complexion had taken on the color of Grandma’s cigars. He didn’t smoke at all. Not in the car and not afterward.

  I almost asked him what sport the Chevalier Roze had starred in, the one who gave his name to the last section of stands. But he didn’t give me a chance. And this time, we didn’t even go up. We stayed down below, in front of the entrance to the stands.

  “The Chevalier Roze, see, was a nobleman who’d acted heroically during the Great Plague of Marseille in 1720. He took a team of convicts with him and they threw all the corpses that were rotting in the streets into old abandoned wells. He caught the plague, but he survived. A miracle!”

  At least one of them didn’t die. I thought about it so hard that André laughed and said: “You were starting to think this goddamn stadium was a graveyard, weren’t you? Well, that’s not completely wrong . . .”

  His face darkened and his hand mechanically groped for the packet of Marlboros that was no longer in his pocket.

  “It’s such a graveyard here that they built a purification plant under the stadium that produces the best water in Europe. That’s what it takes to administer extreme unction to our dead.”

  I never saw André again. I asked Grandma why he didn’t come around anymore. And she answered the less I knew, the better.

  * * *

  On July 28, 2000, Patrice de Peretti, the most famous fan in Vélodrome Stadium, died of a coronary aneurism. A sad end for “Depé,” known throughout all the stands in Europe as the emcee of the MTP, the Marseille Too Powerful fan club. For years, rain or shine, winter or summer, in Turkey or in Denmark, he harangued his troops. Stripped to the waist, always. On the radio they said Olympique de Marseille fans wanted to rename a section in his honor. I had to go to the stadium before it was too late. I took the Prado, sped my BMW up to the gate where I used to enter with André. The same flunkey came to the gate. I lowered the window and said: “Back in the day, I came here in the morning a couple times with Dédé, you remember?”

  His face lit up. “Dédé! Yes, of course.”

  He pulled open the gate and let me in. I parked right in the middle of the empty lot. There were more people working than usual because there’d been a championship game against Troyes the night before. They had to spruce up the field, pick up the trash. I walked around the arena to get to the north stands. During the night, members of the MTP had sprayed Depé’s name all over the walls of the Ray Grassi section. They even rubbed off the boxer’s name to replace it with the name of their martyr, carried off at the age of twenty-eight by his love for the club and for ganja. A second death for the former featherweight. His section was now the Depé section. With the can of black spray-paint I’d brought, I added an accent on the first “e,” erased the foot of the “p,” and completed the letter. Then I admired my work. The Dédé section. To make my own homage.

  I walked back to the car. The flunkey held the gate open for me respectfully.

  “How long ago did he die?”

  “Seventeen years . . .”

  “That doesn’t make us any younger. You were . . .”

  “Thirteen.”

  “He always talked about his kid, his little guy . . . Always.” He shook his head and sighed heavily. “When you lose your father, you never recover, ain’t that right?”

  I didn’t say anything. I had no idea. I started up the BMW. Opened the window and lit up a Marlboro. I could see Notre-Dame de la Garde. The Holy Mother up there on the top of her hill was giving me the finger. I drove toward the sea in the summer heat.

  SILENCE IS YOUR BEST FRIEND

  by PATRICK COULOMB

  Le Panier

  1

  The music woke me up. Like it does about three times a week. The streets aren’t wide in this neighborhood. Often just alleys, but elsewhere, venturing even into the broadest ones would be thought of as taking your life in your hands. I have noisy neighbors who only have a very vague notion of time and politeness. They wear me out too. Between them and my students . . .

  I’d collapsed on my couch when I got back from school. Fell asleep right away and slept like a log. When the music woke me up, for once it was at a decent hour, so I wasn’t going to complain. Actually, it was the right time to go out, take a little walk, maybe get a bite in one of the new joints around here. I live in Le Panier, the heart of the city, but it’s also becoming its belly, a neighborhood crammed with trendy little restaurants. Geographically, it’s a hill overlooking the sea, a labyrinth of alleys where it’s hard for cars to get through, a challenge to the past, in continual flux but always anchored by the perpetual movement of the sea and the immigrants who hang onto it, wave after wave. The men and women who live here come from Africa, Europe, and Asia; they’re black, white, and yellow, Arabs and Europeans, people of the land and islanders, poor and rich. Well . . . rich, that’s pretty new. Before, the few rich people of the neighborhood were more or less members of the thugocracy. Since I moved here, I’ve become one of the many specialists on the subject. Like a true geography teacher, I’ve tried to understand if there was some kind of determinism or fate, if there was any link between a land that welcomes immigrants and the birth of organized crim
e, and if Le Panier could be seen as a neighborhood with a curse on it, branded by that fatality. I think the answer is yes.

  I shook myself awake, got up, looked in the mirror, and slipped a book in my pocket—I always take a book with me—and walked briskly to the place de Lenche. The old Greek agora, from the very beginnings of the city: a square that slopes downward, looking over the nearby sea, full of cafés and restaurants, with a theater, as if Greek tragedy had taken root here for all eternity, God knows why. Tragedy begets violence and, in this respect, eternity is not an illusion: what is more eternal than violence? . . . Before the Vieux Quartier, the Old Neighborhood, as it was called for a long time, was razed to the ground by the Germans and the Vichy government in January 1943, it was the dark side of Marseille, a huge bordello where sailors from every sea refueled on fresh meat, a labyrinth of every kind of trafficking, the dead end for every naïve fool.

  I walk up and down the ghosts of streets that are no more and I hear shots from the 1930s, I can make out the knives cutting the throats of people who didn’t pay up. I go further on in time and am close to the sixties, when the neighborhood, finally rebuilt, was still used as a base for thugs from the French connection. At that time, Le Panier was a kind of Hell’s Kitchen looking over the Mediterranean, with its Dagos and Corsicans as powerful as the Gambinis and the Corleones . . . I walk in the blood of the past and the walls and cobblestones speak to me and scream violence, violence, violence.

  I know, everything has changed, it’s now full of health food stores and artists of all kinds, art galleries and clothing stores, there are even Canadians who make bagels. It’s no longer Little Italy or the Bowery, it’s Soho or Greenwich Village. On a smaller scale, of course, with streets so narrow you can hear your neighbors belching across the way. So just imagine, when they turn the music up to the max . . .

  I decided not to think about it anymore. A kid bumped into me as I turned a corner going up the stairs of the Accoules. I felt around in my pockets, nothing missing. You get paranoid fast in this neighborhood when you think about the past too much.

  When I got back to my place, silence had finally filled the night; it must’ve been midnight, the hour of crime. At least.

  I finally slept well that night. I dreamed of Carbone and Spirito, of Francis the Belgian and Gaëtan Zampa, firing away like mad, bumping off the dumb, aggressive kids in my class of seniors and my inconsiderate neighbors in the same bloodbath. Calmly, I’m telling you. As long as I was only whacking them in my dreams. I’m a calm man, everybody tells me nobody’s more laid-back than I am. But only if I’ve had a good night’s sleep, I say.

  At school, it didn’t get any better. I’m too laid-back, that’s just it: they take advantage. Whoever tries to insult me most takes the prize. I’ve had it up to here with those little shits who won’t listen. When I talk about history they laugh, and when I teach geography they show me their backs. As if it didn’t matter; but here in this damn city more than anywhere else, they really should take an interest in the past. Just like they should know how the world works, the history of migrations, understand Marseille’s role in this human maelstrom. They come from all over, they’ve got roots in their Elsewhere. They’re all islands in their own heads, villages, but they act as if this has no connection to what I teach them. I could help them decipher who they are and why, help them find their way, but no, these morons would rather piss me off by making fun of my name: “LaMarca la Marquise! LaMarca la Marquise!” Yeah, that really cracks them up, and I’m not even gay, just single and vaguely intellectual. But all they see in me is a guy who’s not quite a man—contemptible. Just goes to show how mixed up they are.

  Back at my place it’s no better: the morons across the street go on thinking they’re at a nightclub every other night.

  I’m tired, I’m telling you. Knocked out.

  And it’s been going on for months.

  2

  I don’t know if I’m dreaming or awake. I’ve got a book in my hand, a book like a weapon. A nice big weapon. A nice fat volume. At least six hundred pages. Yes, pages instead of punches. Bigger reach. Harder. Hit him, keep on hitting.

  No, I really have the feeling that this time I’m not dreaming. I hit and hit again, I crush his throat under the thick spine of the book—a crime novel, in fact, what could be more fitting? I really think the guy’s dead, right there at my feet. I feel his pulse, nothing. I press my ear to his heart, silence. I wait. Nothing comes, no movement, no breathing . . . I took first aid classes long ago, I can recognize death when it’s there.

  It’s here.

  It’s crazy. I couldn’t have done that. Not me. I’m a calm guy, so calm. Nobody’s more laid-back than me. I’m the coolest, the most accommodating. Everybody says so. I didn’t kill anyone, it’s just impossible. Impossible.

  But there’s no doubt about it, the guy here isn’t moving. He’s slumped right there with his back to the wall as if he had too much booze, all limp and soft, flat as a crepe, motionless. I can’t believe it.

  What is this book anyway? I still have it in my hand. I read about fifty pages of it. Or tried to. With that racket, no way I could really read. Random by Mathieu Croizet. Heavy . . . I noticed on the back cover that the author is a lawyer. Hey, I could call him. The guy at my feet . . . we killed him together, right? If I need someone to defend me, I couldn’t do better than a lawyer for an accomplice.

  I can’t believe it! Shit, man, wake up. Can’t say I was crazy about you, but that doesn’t mean I’d waste you like that, smash your throat with a big fat thriller. This is ridiculous.

  Jesus, what the hell am I doing here? I came to ask the guy to turn off his fucking music. In this apartment, I’m telling you, they have a party three times a week. Like they’re the only people in the world, like their place is a nightclub, the assholes. For months it’s been like that; I completely lost it, lost hold of who I was, that calm cool cat, he split, like he’s not in me anymore.

  I went downstairs at two thirty. I’d been pretty nice; after all, I hadn’t called the cops; I’d been patient, telling myself they were bound to stop sooner or later. And I saw them coming out of the building across the street one after the other, completely smashed on booze and weed. Yelling in the alley. Then disappearing into the night in a straggly single file. But that fucking music was always turned up to the max, I could hear it as if I was on their goddamn couch swilling whiskey-Cokes with them. I put my boots back on and walked out with the book in my hand, my keys in my pocket and my nerves on edge. I rang a bell at random. Some moron opened the door. I walked up to the floor above, to where the music was coming from. The door was half open. It’s funny, but on the landing of their floor the music wasn’t as loud as at my place. I shrugged. Assholes. A shaggy-haired guy opened the door all the way, laughing stupidly.

  “Hi, man, you’re late. Everybody split already.”

  “So why don’t you turn off your music? Let me tell you something, I live across the street and it’s starting to fuck me up, hearing your music all the time. Some people have to work, you know?”

  “Hey, man, take it easy. It’s not late, nobody’s here now. It’s all cool!”

  I looked at him, stunned. He’s telling me, me, it isn’t late? He’s telling me to be cool? Me, the most laid-back cat west of the Canebière? I began waving the book around in my hand and it hit his shoulder, but not too hard.

  “Hey, man!”

  “What, what’s the matter?” I said.

  I couldn’t control my right hand anymore, and this time I smacked him right in the face with the book, intentionally. He backed away.

  “You’re gonna stop your fucking music now, okay?”

  The guy wasn’t moving anymore, his smile frozen across his face. Then the asshole started up again. “Hey, cool, man, be cool,” he said while trying to close the door.

  I blocked it with the tip of my boot and pushed—the door with one hand, the joker with the other. And I walked in.

  “Ok
ay, deejay, where’s your fucking sound system?”

  He’d collapsed onto the floor. Waved, pointing to a wall. I gave the hi-fi a good solid kick and swept it all away with a backhand chop of my book. His gear crashed to the floor, a nice wooden, well-varnished floor. Silence returned at last. You could hear a garbage truck going by down below, probably around the rue Caisserie. Urban bliss regained. If you perked up your ears you could almost get the backwash of waves in the Vieux-Port. Almost.

  I was going to get the hell out, but he stood up and staggered toward me, half dazed, half mad.

  “Hey, man,” he said. I wondered if he had any other words in his vocabulary. He started to push at me weakly, but apparently the weed and booze weren’t giving him superpowers . . . I pushed him away but he kept at it. I banged him once on the head with the book so he’d stop, then another. He kept going, the asshole. So did I. Bang, bang, bang! I began hitting harder, harder and harder. Man, it felt good. Until I saw him knocked out against the wall.

  “Asshole,” I muttered. “Fucking asshole.” And I shrugged.

  I pushed the book down over his throat, the spine against his glottis. I pushed hard, I wasn’t myself anymore, I hit, harder, I heard him gasping for breath, gurgling, I was beside myself, I crushed the book down even harder to make him swallow his trachea along with his birth certificate. Wasn’t moving anymore. Not at all.

  This time he was really dead. It’s insane. I couldn’t have done that. Not me. I’m a calm guy, so calm. The most laid-back cat in the world.

  * * *

  Okay, so I hadn’t touched anything in the asshole’s room, I’d done it all with the book. All I had to do was get rid of it. No see, home free; I felt pretty calm, considering. Although not seen—that remained to be seen, as a matter of fact. The only hitch in this whole thing. They’d think one of his buddies had knocked him off, or several of them, under the influence. Of booze, weed, or whatever. I didn’t feel an ounce of remorse. I told myself that would surely come later, there was a chance I’d totally screwed up my life. We’d see. Then I thought I heard the stairs creak. I froze for a moment, I thought I saw a shadow go through the door and walk up to the floor above. I shivered violently, feverishly, and then I came to, made sure I didn’t touch anything, and left. The stairs creaked again. It was time for me to disappear. I left the door half open and went out, crossing myself and hugging the walls.