Arab Jazz (11 page)

“Hello, is that the commissariat in Niort? Lieutenant Kupferstein, Paris, nineteenth arrondissement. Please could you put me through to the
commissaire
or the officer on duty?”

“Please hold . . .”

“Hello, Commissaire Jeanteau speaking. You caught me just as I was leaving.”

“Good evening, Commissaire, this is Lieutenant Kupferstein from the nineteenth in Paris. We have a murder on our hands. A young woman, Laura Vignola. Her parents live in your neck of the woods.”

“Right. And what can we do for you?”

“Well, errr . . . We found the family’s contact details on our system, and just as I was about to call them I thought to myself that I couldn’t really tell them the news over the phone. I was wondering if one of your people could take care of it?”

“You know, we’re short-staffed as it is, even without doing your work as well as our own.”

“I understand, but imagine the responsibility—what if something were to happen? You never know how people might react. She was their only child . . . Plus we already know from the concierge in the building where Laura lived that she didn’t get along at all well with her parents. The chances are—in fact it’s more than likely—that this spat had nothing to do with the crime, but at this stage we have to follow up every lead. So if you or one of your more experienced officers could handle this process personally, it would be an opportunity to get the parents to talk and to shed some light on the victim’s personality.”

“Fine, I’ll deal with it. My wife is used to me coming home late, and what’s more the in-laws are around for dinner this evening . . . this gives me a decent excuse to arrive in time for pudding and the digestifs! Tell me about the murder.”

Rachel briefs the
commissaire
, leaving out the most striking features of the crime scene to limit any risk of leaks. Jeanteau promises to call back as soon as he has carried out the task. She gives him her cell number before casually throwing in one last detail.

“Oh, I almost forgot, Commissaire. They’re Jehovah’s Witnesses.”

“Jehovah’s Witnesses! Serious nut-jobs, aren’t they? Listen, I’ve investigated cases involving sects before, but this would be new for me. Maybe this’ll be educational . . . I’ll call you as soon I’m done there. Wish me luck!”

“Good luck, Commissaire!”

*

Exhausted, Rachel needs to get out of the Bunker as quickly as possible. She goes back over to Jean, who has risen from his torpor, and suggests they take a stroll to the Boeuf-Couronné for that much-needed
onglet
.

9

In the narrow corridor leading from the waiting area to the psychoanalyst’s consulting room, Dr. Germain—around sixty, tall, slightly stooping, angular face, white hair, rounded glasses, brown corduroy pants—holds out his hand to Ahmed.

“So, you came back . . .”

Ahmed looks at the doctor, and all of a sudden he remembers what it is to go through psychoanalysis. It’s not just an unburdening, an emptying; it’s also a rejection of the obvious. He came back, and so right away he has to reflect on his return. He knows what he has come to say, but why does he want to say it? Ahmed remembers how once—here, in this place—he had established the parallel between psychoanalysis and confession. “Except that here there is no judgment,” the doctor had stressed. Another time, when he was discussing the pangs of guilt he suffered about his mother, Dr. Germain had suggested he move toward “a mode of expression that is not that of expiation.”

“Yes, I came back.”

He lies down on the couch and suddenly feels good.

“It’s funny, your question. ‘So you came back . . .’ It’s not really even a question. If I had to write it down, it would be followed by a dot-dot-dot rather than a question mark. Someone needs to invent some new punctuation for psychoanalysis, in fact. Your questionless question has thrown me completely. I was going to go for a sort of confession. Tell you about the thing that took me to Maison Blanche. What I saw. The thing I’ve never been able to bring up. So unspeakable I ended up letting it get confused with my silence. Just three minutes ago I was still in that state of confusion.”

“And now?”

“Now? I know I’ve got to give it a name. But I also know that deep down it’s not the reason for my silence. Even if it’s quite a thing to see a murder and not be able to do anything to stop it.”

“A murder . . .”

“It’s like there’s this knot tying together my father’s death, my mother’s madness, and the murder of that girl at the warehouse . . . Everything’s lumped together in my throat . . . It’s like this thing that won’t go away. Like all the images that have filled my mind for so long. It was my father who died, for fuck’s sake, so why do I always picture myself killing women?”

“I see. What did they do wrong, these women?”

“Oh fucking hell!”

A heart-rending sigh. Silent tears stream down Ahmed’s cheeks. He carries on, his voice strangled.

“It’s the second time today. The first time was thinking about Laura.”

“Laura is your neighbor, if I remember right?”

“Was.”

No response.

“She was murdered. I suddenly realized that she’d been in love with me without ever saying it, and now she’s dead and gone forever. And I’m sad we’ll never live the life we might have had. And I decided to live. And so I came back.”

Dr. Germain’s voice catches slightly.

“Someone has killed Laura. Is that what you’re telling me?”

“Yes, that’s exactly what I’m telling you. Hey, Doctor?”

“Yes . . .”

Ahmed sits up and looks the psychoanalyst in the eye.

“How far does patient confidentiality go? Secrets from sessions like this?”

Dr. Germain looks at him squarely with his bright eyes.

“There is no limit. What’s said in here stays in here. Do you want to continue?”

Ahmed lies back down.

“I was the first to see Laura’s body, but I didn’t say anything to the police. A former resident of Maison Blanche living on disability benefits who spends most of his time reading noir fiction about psychopathic killers . . . Not a chance! When I saw her I was overwhelmed with rage, with a desire for revenge. That’s what made me snap out of it. That’s what made me come here. Before doing anything I need to sort out my head. To separate the stuff with my father, my mother, my obsessions, Laura, Emma . . .”

“Emma?”

“Yeah, Emma. She’s the one I’ve never told you about. The one I saw get murdered before my eyes at the warehouse. With Laura, that makes two.”

“Did you see Laura being murdered?”

“No, I found her later. They had strapped her to the edge of her balcony. A drop of blood fell on my face. I looked up and there was her foot floating above my head. I went up to see . . . Emma—that’s a whole other story.”

“Maybe we’ll talk about it next time?”

This is how Dr. Germain always used to wrap up his sessions, whether it was a quarter of an hour or three. Ahmed feels a bit taken aback, but he knows from the tone of the doctor’s voice that these fifteen minutes carried some serious weight.

“Tomorrow I can fit you in at 7:30 a.m. Does that work for you?”

He doesn’t hang about, thinks Ahmed.

“7:30, fine.”

“We can also talk about payment then . . .”

“Payment, yeah, of course . . .”

“If you want to get yourself together, I don’t think we can proceed as we did before. With your medical costs being covered, I mean.”

“Yes, you’re probably right . . . I’ll think about it.”

“That’s right, think about it. Good night.”

Dr. Germain holds out his hand to Ahmed, who shakes it.

“Good night.”

The canal is strewn with young people loaded up with beers and guitars. Ahmed barely notices them. He thinks back to his mother, whom he hasn’t seen for years. He remembers her slow descent into madness, and the way she took it out on him when he visited her in the hospital. Yes, he had been right to sever ties with her. A case of survival.

On avenue Jean-Jaurès, just after Ourcq Métro station, Ahmed instinctively casts an eye through the window of the Boeuf-Couronné. The sight of the two lieutenants sitting in front of their
onglets
strikes him as perfectly natural. They are meant to be in this place at this precise moment. Jean, lost in thought, brings the chunks of red meat robotically to his mouth. Rachel, however, savors each mouthful, each sip of wine. It makes him happy imagining himself with her, just like that, enjoying a meal in silence. In the meantime he thinks how great it would be to be able to call her. One last glance and he shifts off to the
tabac
. A few minutes later, France Télécom card in pocket, and just as he is stepping through the door of his block, he bumps into a tall black man wearing a prayer cap and an ankle-length
kamiss
. Moktar does not look at him. Only a murmur under his breath as he passes.

“
Halouf
-eating bastard, you’ll burn in hell like a pig stuck on a spit. You stink of white man . . .”

Bewildered, Ahmed continues on his way, wondering about the reason for the insults. He stops and turns back. No sign of Moktar. Where had he gone? Which building, which shop had he entered? Strange. One more thing for him to get his head around. In his mailbox he finds an envelope with a Bordeaux postmark. News from his cousin Mohamed.

One morning, nine months earlier, a young man of around twenty-three or twenty-five had rung his doorbell and claimed to be his cousin. Mohamed Nassir was the son of Nafissa, sister of Ahmed Taroudant, the man who had saved Latifa. He’d had no difficulty finding him because Ahmed still lived in the studio apartment that Taroudant had shared with his mother at the time of his birth thirty years before. Mohamed seemed to suspect that Ahmed was secretly his uncle’s son, and that he’d married, had children, and continued to keep his preference for men under wraps. The “cousin” had stayed three weeks, enough time to check out Paris while waiting for university in Bordeaux, where he was studying for a degree in physics, to restart. Ahmed hadn’t thought twice about this supposed cousin he’d never heard of moving in with him just like that. Perhaps it was because Mohamed represented the only remaining link with the country of his crazy mother and his dead father. A link that he’d never delved into, but which he knew he would never let go of. He had never felt anything other than French. To him Morocco was off the radar; a forbidden, dangerous, inaccessible country. Yet he had felt singularly close to his cousin despite the fact that, on paper, they were totally different. Mohamed never missed a prayer. He tried to awaken Ahmed to the benefits of Islam, not that he ever gave him any trouble about drinking alcohol. The two of them had found a balance. Ahmed didn’t want to lose this unexpected cousin by revealing to him that they weren’t really related at all and that, on top of that, his uncle was homosexual.

Back in Bordeaux, Mohamed had written one or two letters to which Ahmed hadn’t responded, having relapsed into his interminable reading mode. Then nothing, until today. Up in his apartment, after scaling the six flights of stairs, he places the letter on the table and his jacket on the chair, sits on the ground, and sets about thinking of nothing.

10

One hour earlier, as evening was falling, Rachel and Jean were sauntering toward the Boeuf-Couronné. The teachers and students were filing out of the Lubavitch school on rue Petit. White shirts, Borsalino hats, wool tzitzit tassels trailing from black jackets. Their eyes skimmed past Jean and Rachel. At least they did over Jean; with Lieutenant Kupfterstein there was a moment’s hesitation . . . As if goyim didn’t exist. As if the only people that were real were Jews in general and Hasidic Jews in particular. Jean could not bear this attitude. Rachel, for her part, was fascinated by this ability to not see.
How do they do it?
It reminded her of her trip to India. More than once she had felt that strange sensation of ceasing to exist, of literally disappearing as a result of not being registered. In order to endure it she had reasoned that the caste system must be so entrenched that a Brahmin—when encountering an untouchable—can alter his trajectory to keep the other at a distance and therefore avoid acknowledging him. He sees him and doesn’t see him at the same time . . . Rachel had told Jean about this to calm him down. “Do you really think the Brahmins’ craziness makes up for these Lubavitch nuts?!” came the reply. But in fact his rage did subside.

At the next crossroads there was a change of atmosphere. A small group of Muslims of all shapes and sizes was listening devoutly to a tall, very thin black man. Prayer cap on his head, white
kamiss
diligently coming down to his ankles, in imitation of the dress of the holy ancestors, the Prophet Muhammad and his companions. Rapt in a well-rehearsed trance, Moktar spoke to them of the time when all people made up one single community, a single body around the Prophet. “And so the Jews and the Christians listened to the message. Their hearts were not closed and they came to know the truth before them. Everyone embraced the true religion.” Moktar is twenty-seven years old, his audience ranging from fifteen to eighteen. Their eyes were gleaming, lit up by the self-proclaimed preacher’s spirited speech peppered with Arabic words. “Following the Prophet’s death—
salla Allaahu ‘alayhi wa salaam
—discord descended upon Man.
Fitna
is the work of
Shaytan
, let it never be forgotten. And to return to the unity of
Ummah
we must never cease to imitate the holy ancestors, the
Sahabah
 . . .”

AAAAAAMIN!

With a collective sigh the assembled gave vent to the day’s frustrations.

The two lieutenants had stopped and heard everything. Moktar and the others carried on, as if not noticing them. But their pretending was even less subtle than it was back at the Lubavitch: the tension in the bodies of the young audience; the wavering tone of the Salafist’s voice . . . Every utterance indicating that it was them, yes them, that they were addressing—the Jews, the Christians, the atheists. Police in the service of
Shaytan
doomed to suffer the eternal hellfire of Gehenna. And sooner the better.