Arab Jazz (25 page)

After that she quite literally blanked it from her mind. She didn’t even tell her girlfriends, with whom she shared everything, and who were so worried about her since she started following—or at least pretending to follow—her mother and brother on the family
teshuvah
, the return to the “true” Jewish faith. The subject wasn’t broached again for another three weeks until, a few days after her midterm exams, her beaming mother announced that Dov was coming to Paris in six days’ time to mark their engagement. This was her wake-up call. The Rébecca of old came back with a jolt, and she called her friends.

An emergency meeting was held at Laura’s with Aïcha and Bintou. The immediate, unanimous decision was to get Rébecca onto the next flight Laura was working on. By an ironic twist of fate, its destination was New York. As chance would have it, her passport had been renewed for a trip to Israel four years earlier. On the Thursday morning, after scribbling a note for her mother and brother, and without looking back, she left the apartment, the building, the street where she had grown up. At Laura’s she got changed, became herself again. Sixteen hours later the two friends were getting off the Newark–Grand Central shuttle.

“I was so happy! The skyscrapers all around me! I felt more free than ever. And—if you’ll excuse me—all the more free because this had meant to be a place of confinement . . .” She stares at him in amazement before continuing. “And here we are today sitting and chatting in Starbucks . . . It’s so weird . . . I should have run a mile when I saw you. But I came in here with you instead. It’s nuts! Like some kind of dybbuk story. Spooky! But it’s been like that from the word ‘go’. When we got off the bus at Grand Central, we hung around five minutes to buy some water and a paper from a Pakistani guy’s stall. And all of a sudden Laura went white as a sheet, staring straight ahead. I saw her mouth the word ‘Daddy’. I followed her gaze: a beautiful young blonde was passionately kissing an old, awkward, graying man of about fifty. He didn’t spot us. He got onto the bus to the airport and disappeared. My friend was petrified. Arriving in New York only to find her father—a super-strict Jehovah’s Witness—in the arms of a girl the same age as her. It was all too much!”

“Your friend’s a Jehovah’s Witness?”

“No, she got out of there. Her childhood and teenage years were a living hell . . . Her father is head of a local branch of the organization somewhere in France.”

Rébecca loses herself in thought for a moment. When she tunes back in she sees that Dov is in a state of shock.

“What’s up? Something upset you about my story? You look like you’ve seen a ghost!”

Dov pulls himself together, manages the hint of a smile, and checks his watch.

“No, no, I . . . I just realized I’m running late for an important meeting. I’m sorry, Rébecca, but I’ve got to bust now. Can we do this again?”

“I’m leaving town tomorrow. Listen, Dov, I’m not sure I want to see you again. This chapter of my life is over. Give me your number . . . If I feel up to it, I’ll call you. But you . . . I’m asking you not to look me up. Can I trust you?”

“Yeah, of course, don’t mention it. I’ll leave you in peace.”

Five minutes later and three streets away, standing stock-still before a pedestrian crossing, Dov stares at his telephone. Contacts: the name “Susan” on the screen. His hesitant thumb hovers over the green button, an unsure look in his eyes. He blinks and presses the button. Perfectly aware of the consequences.

31

The girls are standing in front of Le Point Éphémère club. Its name a metaphor for the temporality of existence in general, and for theirs at this particular moment. They are tense and fidgety as they wait for Rachel. All their hopes, all their trust strangely resting on this one policewoman. They want to see Laura’s killers punished, of course. They also want to lift the shadow that has overwhelmed their beloved brothers. It’s still a mystery to them. Why the boys and not us? At what point did they start crossing over to the dark side? As kids and teenagers they admired their big brothers more than anything. The 75-Zorro-19 days were like one long trance. Bintou, Aïcha, and Rébecca didn’t miss a single show, tagging the group’s name on every wall in the neighborhood. Until that unforgettable, exceptional evening when they got on stage in front of all the local kids and did the dance routine they’d rehearsed for months, inspired by the start of that Spike Lee film
Do the Right Thing
. Five minutes of pure energy and fun. It felt like right then, at that precise moment, their lives had officially begun. After that they got their heads down to review for their baccalaureate. They forgot about hip hop and their brothers for several months. Then there was that strange period when Moktar started going crazy. Hawa, Bintou’s mother, said that it all stemmed from there. Fair enough, she couldn’t stand Codou, the beatmaker’s mother. The mere mention of her name would make her face shut down and her mouth harden, little lines appearing at the corners of her lips. “It’s her, it’s Codou. I knew her from back home. She’s always been jealous, envious. She didn’t even want her son to succeed. So she cast a spell on the whole group. That’s why you’ve got Moktar hanging around the crossroads dressed in that stupid long
kamiss
of his, and Ruben with his bizarre gangster hat. As for Alpha and Mourad, they spend half their time in that tiny prayer room with their phony imam. I tell you, every day I pray they’ll snap out of it. And they will, you’ll see. They’re my children, all of them. I nursed them, I watched them grow up. As for that Codou, let me tell you! She’ll get her comeuppance in Paradise!” Aïcha and Bintou only half believe in charms, prayers, and protection spells, in all that stuff from the
bled
. Their brothers’ gradual decline remains a mystery to them.
Why them and not us?
The truth is they do know why, even if they’ve never said so out loud. It comes from their parents, their way of being, moving, speaking. Words, gestures, and ways of seeing that the girls wanted to adopt, while their brothers only sought to adopt them in part, mostly craving the validation of others. They were more prone to focusing their energies on countering a section of society’s scorn toward “Muslim youths,” that dangerous new class of the postcolonial Republic. They were frequently tempted to reverse the feeling of stigma, to brand themselves proudly with the very religion that brought them such relentless contempt.

Bintou and Aïcha never felt the so-called war against Islam had anything to do with them. They quite simply couldn’t have cared less. It had no bearing on the way they defined themselves in the universe. Aïcha’s worldview was largely influenced by her father. Arzeki had spent his entire career as a pâtissier at Dalloyau, just opposite the jardin du Luxembourg. A decent man, she had never known him to harm or speak ill of anyone. A calm man too, never one to pray, fast, or say anything about God. Of course she loved her mother Khadidja, a reasonably pious lady, but she felt much closer to her father. It was his example she followed. Instinctively and without question. Bintou’s role model was her mother, Hawa. A spirited woman who had her own reasons, deep inside her, for railing against a world order that she felt was grossly outdated, though she seldom spoke of it. Except once, to her daughter. A conversation that left an indelible mark on Bintou’s memory.

Lieutenant Kupferstein approaches the two girls with long strides. Rachel is the precise representation of what they want to be “when they grow up.” Not a police officer, no; just an upstanding woman. She pauses when she reaches them, looks both of them in the eye, then nods to the towpath. No time to sit down before the next meeting, so a little walk together down the canal will have to suffice. It should be enough to talk everything through. Almost, at least.

Bintou takes a deep breath before starting, like she used to back at primary school before diving into the blue water of the swimming pool with its trembling lines.

“We were there, on the corner of the street, and they filed past us without noticing us, one after the other. What time was it? One in the morning. It was hot. We hadn’t gone our separate ways yet. We needed to talk some more. To be together, the two of us, a bit longer. We’d just been on Skype with Rébecca for an hour. Laura wasn’t there. She was meant to be coming back from Los Angeles the following morning, after we left for college. We never thought we wouldn’t get to see her again. Why would we have? How were we to know that her fate was playing out right there under our noses?”

Bintou stops, lowers her head. When she looks up her eyes are filled with tears. Rachel takes it on board, but subtly keeps things moving.

“Did you try to see her after she got back?”

“We called her but her cell was off. We didn’t insist too much because she worked on long flights and got jet lag really badly. She needed to recover. Anyway, we weren’t worried about anything.”

Rachel urges the girls on again.

“So who appeared that night on the street corner?”

“75-Zorro-19: the whole gang. It was surreal. Moktar, wearing a three-quarter length Adidas tracksuit that was a bit too long, his
kamiss
and his prayer cap, followed thirty seconds later by our brothers, Alpha and Mourad, looking like your average computer geeks. Then, after five minutes, there was Ruben, with his skullcap and tzitzits. All heading into Sam’s. We had to pinch ourselves. But we were both there, and we both saw the same thing. Our instinct was to hide as soon as we saw our brothers. Over the four years they’ve been going to Haqiqi’s prayer room with Moktar they’ve belonged to another world, and we’ve lost touch. They tried loads to convert us, but it didn’t work, so they dropped it. Since then, we’ve barely had anything to say to each other, and we’ve kept out of one another’s way. When Ruben went into the barber shop he sat down next to Sam and just nodded to the others. There was no warmth in it, but it’d been ages since they’d spoken a word to each other . . . We left them there, went home feeling pretty confused. It was all so weird that at the time we didn’t talk about it. But since Laura was found dead we haven’t been able to stop thinking about it . . . We can’t let it go: it doesn’t add up. Why are these former friends who had a bad falling-out all meeting up like that? And why at Sam’s?”

“Have you asked them?”

“We haven’t dared. We wanted to get your thoughts on it. We need to know who killed her. We don’t want to get our brothers in any trouble, but we need to know.”

Bintou stares at Rachel, tears streaming down her cheeks. The policewoman takes her hand in her own and grips it hard.

“You don’t want them to get in any trouble, but you want the truth. Unfortunately I think you’re going to have to choose between the two. I have to go now. I’ll think about what I can do. Thank you for talking to me. Not just for Laura, but for you too.”

She touches Aïcha’s back softly and moves away before turning around again.

“See you at two in the morning. I’ll stock up on coffee.”

What now? Bringing in the brothers would risk alerting Sam. For the moment, neither she nor Jean is in possession of anything tangible. Rachel decides to leave it to bubble away, gathers her thoughts, breathes, and prepares to take on the Jehovah’s Witness defector, who’d requested they meet at a brasserie in République. Her telephone rings. It’s Ahmed: she can tell from the number. No one else calls her from a landline.

“Ahmed, I’m a bit tied up. Is this just to hear the sound of my voice, or was there something else?”

“Well, there’s nothing wrong with the sound of your voice, but it’s not that. Something came back to me. I was lying on the grass in parc de la Villette, and there was this djemba drummer and, err . . . basically . . . I’ve got a lead on Laura. The motive, I mean. The motive for the crime.”

Ahmed sums up in a few sentences the threats her father made when she told him she’d seen him with his mistress in New York. Rachel goes quiet and feels the blood drain from her.

“Ahmed?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you so much for calling me. I need to contact Niort right away. Can we meet up at the police station at four o’clock?”

“Err . . .”

“Okay, not at the police station, but Jean will have to be there . . . How about the café at the MK2 cinema in quai de Seine?”

“I’ll be there.”

Rachel dials another number without breaking her stride.

“Commissaire Jeanteau.”

“Lieutenant Kupferstein, I was about to call you.”

“Has something happened?”

“Your victim’s mother is in the psychiatric hospital. It was Vincenzo Vignola who signed the request to have her admitted.”

“Commissaire, it’s emerged that when Laura last came to Niort, ten days ago, her father made an explicit threat against her. I’ll have confirmation in less than two hours, but in the meantime, it’s absolutely essential that we find Vincenzo Vignola and that he doesn’t disappear into thin air.”

“I’ll call you back.”

A man is waiting for Lieutenant Kupferstein on the terrace of Le Thermomètre. Around thirty-three years old, wearing an impeccably ironed white shirt, a black jacket, and a well-groomed beard, he looks at her without smiling. In front of him there’s a half-finished bottle of Perrier and a copy of
Le Monde
carefully folded in half. She shakes his hand, sits down, calls the waiter over and orders a macchiato before wading straight in.

“Any other time I would have wanted to hear all about the Jehovah’s Witness organization, but this is something of an emergency: what can you tell me about Vincenzo Vignola?”

As potterlover666 starts telling her about how this man took control of his whole life, destroying him painfully and slowly, Rachel writes a text to Jean:

MK2, quai de Seine, 4:00 p.m. News on L’s father, Sam and 75zorro19.

“It all started back in the summer of 1999, just before I took some leave. I was working at the post office in Niort at the time. I’d saved up five thousand dollars to pay for a dream vacation in Andalusia. At the end of a meeting in the Kingdom Hall, in front of all the others, Vincenzo Vignola asked me how I could spend all that money on myself when I hadn’t put any aside for Jehovah. He called me selfish, asked me if I wanted to be one of the ‘left behind’. He always said that in English, with this strange accent. ‘Do you want to enter the Kingdom of Jehovah, or return to dust like the other ‘left behind?’ I cracked: I gave all five thousand dollars to Jehovah, or should I say Vignola.”