Arab Jazz (24 page)

The telephone rings. It’s Sam. Still living, albeit on borrowed time, Benamer thinks to himself, the morning’s first hint of a smile playing across his lips.

“Yes.”

“Can we meet?”

“Thirty minutes.”

“Okay.”

Half an hour later, in the back room of a couscous restaurant on rue de l’Aqueduc, Sam is playing the smartass.

“Had the full lineup this morning! First there was Ahmed the dreamer, then your friends from the nineteenth, the Jew and the Breton. Ahmed bolted before his haircut was done. He was sweating. I made him think he was the ideal suspect. I can’t see him holding out in front of the police, especially if he hasn’t taken his meds: they could made him confess to anything.”

Benamer has never liked Sam, the idiot who reckons he’s cleverer than everyone else. He has to try hard not to betray his scorn at the man’s lack of judgment in thinking he’s capable of flogging an ideal suspect to Kupferstein and Hamelot, let alone in imagining that Benamer would be able to convince his colleagues that Ahmed is indeed guilty: that it’s an open-and-shut case . . . Thank you and good night! Maintaining an expression of intense, almost reverent concentration throughout, Benamer reflects upon how he’s going to kill Sam. Something simple, like a bullet in the back of the neck, but not without a little speech, some words to avenge all those long minutes spent entertaining his delusions of intelligence. Completely oblivious of what is going through Benamer’s mind, the barber brings his self-satisfied monologue to a close.

“In the end, I told Hamelot and Kupferstein that there was something suspicious about the way Ahmed had spoken about Laura the last time he was in for a haircut. The rest you know already. What do we do now?”

Benamer lets out a flicker of a smile.

“For the moment, you can just sit tight and do nothing—that would be an excellent start.”

29

Stretched out on the grass, Ahmed drifts off to the sound of the
djembe
drum being played by a white Rasta sitting behind the embankment. After Sam’s, shaken up by the barber’s aggression, he had wandered around parc de la Villette before deciding to spark up a joint beneath the belly of a giant dragon slide which was out of service until further notice due to vandalism. He needed to zone out, free up his thoughts. He was cruising at ten thousand feet, flying Thai Airways, enthralled by the TV programs in which he was the sole, omnipresent character. Channel 1—rom-com. He and Rachel move toward each other in slow motion. He offers her a bouquet of purple roses, and she offers him her lips. Channel 2—film noir. Dressed in a trench coat in the cold winter rain, finger on the trigger of his Glock, Ahmed steps into the tunnel at porte des Lilas. A Porsche is waiting for him, hazard lights on, parked in the right-hand lane. He gets a bad feeling, so he ducks into a gap in the wall. A bullet whistles past his ear. He lifts his weapon and fires blindly. Channel 3—snuff movie. Sam is tied to a chair in his barber shop. Ahmed approaches him, a sadistic smile on his lips. His gagged victim looks at him pleadingly. With a false air of remorse, Ahmed shakes his head slowly and starts stabbing him calmly with the scissors—
snip, snip, snip.
Blood starts pouring down his face. Channel 3—second film. Laura’s balcony. She’s already dead. The killer, seen from behind, is almost done trussing her up like a joint of meat. His muscles bulge through his olive-green T-shirt. That neck. That back. Since it first flashed up in his dream thirty-six hours ago, Ahmed has dreaded seeing the killer’s face again; now it’s that back, full screen, that is making him tremble. He already knows what the next shot confirms. The warehouse at Aulnay-sous-Bois, the scene he has played back in his mind so many times. The killer’s back. The same back. The same killer. Since the day before yesterday he has refused to let in the truth that has been knocking at the door of his consciousness: Emma and Laura were the victims of the same man. That man is now turning toward him, looking at him from his drug-skewed screen, fresh from strangling his young victim of five years ago all over again.

FACING THE KILLER

An unfinished face, an absurd blond brute, whose expression lurches between madness and idiocy. The spirit of a naughty twelve-year-old child locked in the body of a solidly built forty-five-year-old man. Monstrous. Ahmed shudders. Something drains from within him. For five years he has been possessed by this faceless killer whose back came to embody his perpetual fear. A concentrate of his father’s suffering and his mother’s torment. Evil in all its ordinariness: the back of a bulky porter from Les Halles market wrapped in a stripy polo shirt. It was this image that had driven him into exile and made a ghost of him for five years. Finally, he is liberated as he sees the face he has feared above all else. Finally, he knows who and what he is fighting.

FEAR—HATE—WILLPOWER

Escape, breathe. Leave behind the vision of the killer in order to dominate it. His spirit soars, not knowing which direction to take now that he has been banished from the desert, the place of his roots. So he takes a different approach, going down the route of his past. The rare, precious moments in his early childhood when Latifa would reel off the chain of his forebears as far back as the thirteenth generation. Although Ahmed hasn’t thought about it for years, the names of his ancestors come back to him effortlessly. “You are the son of Latifa, daughter of Ibrahim, son of Mohamed-Ansar, son of Ethman, son of Mansour, son of Abdallah, son of Omar, son of Suleiman, son of Anwar, son of Ethman, son of Ibrahim, son of Saif al-Islam, son of Nur al-Dîn, founder of the Ahel-Dîn dynasty, who came from the Kinawaïn Mountains on the other side of the desert.” He couldn’t say where they were located, these mountains. In Mali, or Mauritania perhaps? Not at all far from the land of his father’s fathers, somewhere between Mopti and Gao. This long line of unknown ancestors whose name was lost centuries ago during the crossing of the desert. The name, maybe, but not the gift—or is it a curse?—that he inherited: the ability to see things better left unseen. The story of his parents anchors him in a far-off, unfathomable world. It is no doubt why he has never told anyone about it, except Dr. Germain. For the first time he realizes the weight of this silence, which brings him back to Laura.

He imagines her listening, captivated. He pictures her lying on the grass, floating in the clouds, her big eyes staring at him, drinking up the words that send her to a more distant place than any long-haul Air France flight. Light years from the suffocating world of her childhood that she struggled so hard to escape from. On the landing of their apartment block, Laura had recounted her early years to her neighbor on more than one occasion. The horror of growing up with Jehovah’s Witness parents. He had listened to her patiently, not saying a word. That had been enough for her. A recent memory comes to the surface, almost a revelation. It happened in the stairwell barely ten days earlier. Laura had just gotten back from Niort. For a full fifteen minutes she told him how she had called her father a liar, an impostor. He had poisoned her childhood with every sort of absurd prohibition; had made it his business to control the sex lives of others. And now he, who was beyond reproach, had a mistress in New York, and she had seen her with her own eyes. She was the same age as Laura, his daughter! She had told her mother everything on the front steps of the family home she was no longer allowed to visit. Mathilde Vignola had called her a lying whore. She had yelled and tried to claw at her. In the end her father had stood between them, pronouncing the irreversible verdict. “Vile, dirty girl! You will regret this insolence! Bitterly. In this world, not in the next!” At the time Ahmed hadn’t paid it any attention. Just like the other times, he was content with listening politely, not reacting, half absent, half present. It was only today, freed from his prison, his mind enlivened by the smoke in his lungs, that he understood the true meaning of the phrase. Laura’s father had explicitly threatened his daughter. This made him a prime suspect. But what’s the link with him and Sam? No matter. Time to call Rachel.

Once, he can’t remember where, he read that in Yiddish the suffix “lé” is added to form a sort of affectionate diminutive. Rachel, Ra-che-lé.

RA-CHE-LÉ

30

Lincoln Center, Manhattan. Thirteen days earlier.

Ten minutes he’s been following her without her noticing, so absorbed is she in her search for the books listed on a printed sheet. Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, W.E.B. Du Bois, Toni Morrison, V. Y. Mudimbe. Dov observes every minute gesture, records the title of each of the books she places in her basket. Looks at the photo, then looks at her. And again.

In the photo: light brown hair, long skirt, wool coat. A look of contrived humility.

In the flesh: darker brown, curly hair loose on her shoulders, jeans, camisole top. The picture of calm assurance.

And yet the same full, slightly pouting lips, the same beauty spot between her cheekbone and her right eye, the same piercing, electric-gray eyes. No doubt whatsoever.

Black Skin, White Masks
joins
Beloved
in the basket. When Rébecca settles into the queue, Dov stations himself in the courtyard outside, three yards from the entrance. What’s he waiting for? For her to explain to him why she didn’t want him, the tubby American Hasidic Jew? Hopeless! He’s understood perfectly from watching her move, breathe, just be for the last ten minutes. There’s nothing—absolutely nothing!—ultra-Orthodox about her. Susan was right. Rébecca was in character. Why? Who cares why? He could just forget it and disappear from her life forever, a life in which he will represent nothing more than a fleeting image, and a future in which he will not play the slightest role. But Dov stays. Just so he can say to her
I’m here, I exist, I’m not like the person in the photo either
. A sense of boyish indignation. This whole thing has left him hurt.

She emerges, her plastic bag full of course books for the Center for Black Studies at Northern Illinois University. He goes up to her.

“Rébecca!”

Taken aback, she looks up at the stranger who’s addressing her by name in this vast city where she doesn’t know a soul. He is wearing jeans flapping over green Converse sneakers, a Marcus Garvey T-shirt so baggy his tzitzits are barely visible, a green, yellow, and red skullcap. Never in her life has she been confronted by such a phenomenon: an ultra-Orthodox Jewish Rasta built like a chubby rugby player. And he is smiling at her. Somewhere in her head—right at the back—a little light comes on that she’d like to switch off.

“Yes?”

He hands her the photo without saying a word. Rébecca turns deathly pale, like she’s seen a ghost. Making no attempt to deny the evidence, Rébecca grabs hold of the image and studies it carefully before turning back to the funny-looking man. The outline of a soundless question on her lips. “Dov?” He too answers in silence.

Had he looked awkward and surly in his Hasidic garb like in the photo Ruben had given her, she’d have known how to react. She’d have mocked him and then left him standing there. All over and done with in a couple of minutes. But now she’s stumped. Sure, he’s got the skullcap and the tzitzits, but she can tell immediately that something’s up. He’s about as hard-line as she is. What does that mean? What’s this all about? How have two Jews clearly more attracted to hip-hop culture than to the Torah ended up on the verge of an arranged marriage that harks back to the shtetl or the
mellah?
“What the fuck?” She’s uttered these last words aloud. Dov, deep in thought, echoes her.

“Yeah—what the fuck! Come on, let’s grab a table in Starbucks and talk. We owe each other that at least.”

Half an hour later, Dov has detailed his journey from Wichita to Brooklyn via Harvard and prison, omitting only the part about how his chemistry skills have enabled him to manufacture a new drug that is starting to flood the French market thanks to a distribution network in which Ruben, her own brother, is unwittingly playing a vital role. The union that Rebbe Toledano was hankering after was a business contract of sorts. It sealed the transatlantic links between the two branches of the Sephardic Hasidic movement which was without a doubt about to experience a new and dazzling prosperity with the money brought in from the sales of Godzwill. Dov keeps quiet about all this. For the first time he feels a bit ashamed about it. The girl’s sincerity touches him in a new, unfamiliar way. It almost irritates him to realize how affected she is by his story. Because his tale of family breakdown and the abandonment he felt in prison moved Rébecca profoundly. Trying to curtail this unfamiliar outpouring of emotion, he asks her how she came to have her photo taken in full Hasidic getup and how she nearly went ahead with an arranged marriage.

So she sets about explaining how her mother had found comfort in religion after her husband had left her, as had Ruben, who had reacted very badly to the breakup of his hip-hop group. An ultra-Orthodox synagogue had opened down the road from where they lived, run by Rabbi Haïm Seror, a Moroccan like them. Within a few months the whole family was under his influence, including Rébecca, who was worried about losing the two people, besides her girlfriends, she loved most in the world. She changed the way she dressed, observed the Sabbath as much as possible, but still went to school and on to college. For almost four years they left her alone, though one by one all the girls her age in the community started getting hitched. Then they began talking marriage. She played for time, maintained that she wanted to finish her studies, that she wasn’t ready. Her mother insisted, Ruben too, and her resistance was worn down. She gave in because of her love for them. Their sadness made her feel desolate, that the world was tumbling down. Her marriage had become like an obsession, the focus of their lives, as if it would turn back the clock, erasing all memory of her father’s flight. The rabbi’s wife joined forces with them, talking about a young Jew from Brooklyn—Ashkenazi, of course, but educated at Harvard—who was Rebbe Toledano’s protégé. That really did get them going, those Moroccan and Tunisian Jews living in the nineteenth in Paris, all this talk of the rebbe and Brooklyn! To them it was the Messiah and New Jerusalem! So in the end she agreed, anything to see her mother smile at last. The photo was taken that same day.