Solea Page 15

  It was her way of saying I’d taken my time.

  “Did you get lost in the cellar?” Fonfon chimed in.

  I filled their glasses, then mine. “I had to make a phone call.” And before they could make any comment on that, I said, “My phone’s being tapped. The cops. I had to call Babette back.”

  Babette had left that afternoon, Bruno had told me. To stay with some friends of theirs in Nîmes. She was supposed to be taking the train for Marseilles late tomorrow morning.

  “Why don’t you take a vacation, Bruno? You and your family. Go away for a while.”

  I thought of Mavros. I’d told him exactly the same thing. Bruno answered in almost identical terms. Everyone thought they were stronger than Evil. As if Evil was a strange illness. But it was eating us all up, piece by piece.

  “I have too many animals to take care of . . .”

  “Shit, Bruno, your wife and children at least. These guys will stop at nothing.”

  “I know. But my friends and I control all the approaches to the mountain.” He paused. “And we’re armed.”

  May ’68 against the Mafia. I could just see it in my head, and it made my blood run cold.

  “Bruno,” I said, “we don’t know each other. I feel affection for you. Because of what you did for Babette. Taking her in, knowing the risks—”

  He cut me off. “There’s no danger. If you knew—”

  He was starting to get on my nerves, him and his fail-safe security system. “Fuck it, Bruno! This is the Mafia we’re talking about!”

  I guess I was bugging him too, because he cut short our conversation. “O.K., Montale. I’ll think about it. Thanks for calling.”

  Fonfon emptied his glass slowly. “I thought that woman trusted you. That captain.”

  “It wasn’t her. She doesn’t even know who gave the order.”

  “Ah,” he said simply.

  I could sense how worried he was. He looked for a long time at Honorine. She’d been unusually silent this evening. She was worried too. But about me, I knew. I was the last. The last of the three. The last survivor of the boys she’d seen growing up, the boys she’d loved like a mother. Manu and Ugo had been swallowed up by all that shit. She wouldn’t survive if I went too. I knew that.

  “But what’s the story with Babette?” Honorine finally asked.

  “It’s a Mafia story,” I said. “We know how it starts, but we don’t know how it’s going to end.”

  “Is it something to do with all those gangland killings they keep talking about on TV?”

  “Yes, more or less.”

  Since Fargette’s death, there’d been a bloodbath. As Hélène had said, Bruscati was almost certainly involved. I could remember the macabre list clearly. There had been Henri Diana, killed at point blank range in October ’93. Noël Dotori, shot down in October ’94. José Ordioni, in December ’94. Then in ’96, Fargette’s loyal lieutenants Michel Régnier and Jackie Champourlier. The latest on the list were Patrice Meillan and Jean-Charles Taran, one of the last “big names” in the Var underworld.

  “For a long time, we’ve downplayed the activities of the Mafia in France,” I said. “People only talked about the local underworld. Easier to think all these killings were part of a gang war. But now the Mafia’s here. And it’s taking over. Economically and . . . politically, too.”

  There was no need to look into the black disk to understand that. As Babette had written: The new international financial environment is fertile ground for the criminalization of political life. Powerful but clandestine pressure groups linked to organized crime are springing up. In short, the crime syndicates are exerting their influence on national economic policies.

  In those countries that have recently switched to a market economy, and therefore of course in the European Union, key figures in politics and even in government have forged ties of allegiance to organized crime. The nature of the State is being transformed, as are the social structures. In the European Union, this situation is far from being limited to Italy, where the Mafia has penetrated the highest echelons of the State . . .

  And when Babette turned her attention specifically to France, her prognosis was terrifying. The first shots had already been fired in the war against the legally constituted State, a war supported by politicians and industrialists. As the financial stakes were so enormous, it would be a war without mercy. Yesterday, she wrote, a deputy who was in the way was killed. Tomorrow, it may be the turn of a major political figure: a prefect, or a minister. Today, everything is possible.

  “We’re nothing to them. Just pawns.”

  Fonfon kept looking at me, gravely. Then he looked again at Honorine. For the first time, I saw them as they were. Old and tired. Older and more tired than ever. I wished none of this existed. But it did exist. And we found ourselves, unwittingly, on the Devil’s chessboard. But maybe we’d always been there. It was pure chance, coincidence, that had made us realize it. Babette was that chance, that coincidence. And we were pawns. In a game being played to the death.

  Sonia. Georges.

  How to put an end to all of that?

  Babette quoted a United Nations report: Giving more powers to international law enforcement agencies is merely a palliative. Without simultaneous progress in economic and social development, organized crime will persist on a widespread and highly structured scale.

  How could we get out of this mess? Fonfon, Honorine, Babette and I?

  “Would you like some more cheese? Is the provolone good?”

  “Yes, Honorine, it’s delicious. But . . .”

  “Go on,” Fonfon said, his voice falsely cheerful. “Just a little, so we can have another drink.”

  He poured me another glass without waiting to be asked.

  I didn’t believe in chance. Or coincidence. They are simply a sign that we’ve passed over to the other side of reality. Where there can be no compromise with the intolerable. Where one person’s thoughts connect with another’s. The way they do in love. Or in despair. That was why Babette had turned to me. Because I was ready to listen to her. I couldn’t tolerate the intolerable.

  17.

  IN WHICH IT IS SAID THAT REVENGE GETS YOU

  NOWHERE, AND NEITHER DOES PESSIMISM

  I was lost in thought. And my thoughts, as so often, were completely confused. Alcohol-induced, of course. I’d already drunk two big glasses of Lagavulin. The first one I almost downed in one go, as soon as I got back to my little cottage.

  The images of Sonia were fading fast. As if she’d been only a dream. Barely three days. The warmth of her thigh against mine, her smile. These meager memories were fraying at the edges. Even her gray-blue eyes were fading. I was losing her. And Lole was again laying siege to my head. Where she belonged. Her long, thin fingers seemed to be unpacking the cases of our life together. The years gone by started again to dance in front of my eyes. Lole was dancing. Dancing for me.

  I was sitting on the couch. She had put on “Amor Verdadero” by Ruben Gonzalez. Her eyes closed, her right hand lightly touching her stomach, her left hand raised, she barely moved. Only her hips swayed, setting her body in motion. Her whole body. Her beauty took my breath away.

  Later, on this same couch, she snuggled in my arms, and I breathed in the smell of her moist skin and the heat of her solid but fragile body. We were overwhelmed with emotion. It was the time for short sentences. “I love you . . . I feel good here, you know . . . I’m happy . . . How about you?”

  Ruben Gonzalez’s album continued. “Alto Songo,” “Los Sitio’ Asere,” “Pio Mentiroso . . .”

  Months, weeks, days. Until you start hesitating, searching for words, and the sentences grow longer. “What I want is to . . . to keep you in my heart. I never want to lose you, not completely. My one wish is that we stay close, that we continue loving each other . . .”

  The days and the last night
s. “I still have a big place in my heart for you. There will always be a big place for you in my life . . .”

  Lole. Her last words. “Don’t let yourself go, Fabio.”

  And now death was hovering. As close to me as it was possible to be. And its smell was ever-present. The only perfume left to keep me company at night. The smell of death.

  I emptied my glass, with my eyes closed. Enzo’s face. His gray-blue eyes. Sonia’s eyes. And Enzo’s tears. If I had to kill that son of a bitch, it would be for him. Not for Sonia. Not even for Mavros. No. I realized it now. It would be for that boy, and only for him. For all the things you don’t understand at that age. Death. Separation. Absence. That primal injustice, the absence of the father, the mother.

  Enzo. Enzo, my boy.

  What was the point of tears if they couldn’t find their reason for being in another person’s heart? Or in my own?

  I had just refilled my glass when Hélène Pessayre knocked at my door. I’d almost forgotten she was supposed to be coming. It was nearly midnight.

  There was a slightly awkward moment when we hesitated between shaking hands and embracing. We did neither, and I let her in.

  “Come in,” I said.

  “Thanks.”

  We were both suddenly embarrassed.

  “I won’t show you around, it’s too small.”

  “Bigger than my place, from what I can see. Here.” She handed me a CD. Gianmaria Testa. Extra-Muros. “Now you can hear the whole of it.”

  I almost replied, “If I’d wanted to do that, I could have come over to your place.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Now, you’ll have to come here to listen to it.”

  She smiled. I was talking nonsense.

  “Would you like a drink?” I asked, showing her mine.

  “I’d prefer wine.”

  I opened a bottle of Tempier ’92, and poured her a glass. We clinked glasses and drank in silence. We hardly dared look at each other.

  She was wearing stonewashed jeans and a dark blue denim shirt partly open over a white T-shirt. I was starting to be intrigued by the fact that I never saw her in a skirt or a dress. Maybe she doesn’t like her legs, I thought.

  Mavros had had a theory about that. “All women like showing their legs, even if their legs aren’t as good as a model’s or a movie star’s. It’s all part of the game of seduction. You know what I’m saying?”

  “Sure.”

  He’d noticed that ever since Pascale had met Benoît at that party at Pierre and Marie’s, she’d been wearing only pants.

  “And yet she’s still buying pantyhose. Even the ones that only come up to the thigh.”

  One morning, he’d felt so bad, he’d even searched through Pascale’s latest purchases. They’d been living together in an uneasy truce for several weeks, waiting for Bella and Jean to move out of the little house on Rue Villa-Paradis. The previous evening, Pascale had told him she would be away for the weekend. When she’d left to join Benoît, she’d been wearing jeans, but Mavros knew that in her little traveling bag, she had mini-skirts, pantyhose. Even the ones that only come up to the thigh.

  “Just imagine that, Fabio,” he’d said.

  Barely half an hour after Pascale left, that Friday night, he’d called me, in despair.

  I’d responded to his words with a sad smile. I didn’t have any theories as to why a woman might put on a skirt in the morning, rather than a pair of pants. But when the time came, Lole did exactly the same, as I realized with some bitterness. During our last months together, she only ever wore jeans. And of course, the bathroom door was always closed when she came out of the shower.

  I felt like asking Hélène Pessayre about it. But I thought it was maybe a little too bold. And besides, there was a grave look in her eyes now.

  She took a pack of cigarettes from her bag and offered me one. “You see, I bought some.”

  For a while, we were both silent, wreathed in smoke.

  “My father was killed eight years ago,” she began, in a low voice. “I’d just finished my law studies. I wanted to be a lawyer.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “You asked me the other day if that was the way I spent my life. You remember? Dealing with all this shit. Wearing out my eyes on corpses . . .”

  “I was angry. Anger is my defense mechanism. So is being vulgar.”

  “He was an examining magistrate. He’d worked on a lot of corruption cases. False invoices. The covert financing of political parties. One case took him a lot farther than he’d planned to go. He followed the trail from the undeclared funds of a political party—I won’t say which, but it used to be the majority—all the way to a Panamanian bank called the Xoilan Trades. One of General Noriega’s banks. Specializing in drug money.”

  Slowly, she told me the story. In her solemn, almost gravelly voice. One day, her father was informed by the Fraud Squad in Paris that Pierre-Jean Raymond, this political party’s Swiss banker, was arriving in France. He immediately issued a summons against him. Raymond’s briefcase was found to be full of very compromising documents. A minister and several members of parliament were implicated. Raymond was taken into custody. “They put me in with a bunch of Islamists,” he would later complain to his political friends. “I didn’t sleep a wink.”

  “My father indicted him for violation of the rules on the financing of political parties, misuse of social property, breach of trust, forgery and the use of forgeries. He was the first Swiss banker to be prosecuted in France in a case with political connections.

  “My father could have stopped there. But he decided to follow up the financial connections. And that was when things got out of hand. Raymond also handled accounts for Spanish and Libyan clients as well as General Mobutu’s real estate holdings, which have since been sold. In addition, he owned a casino in Switzerland on behalf of a group in Bordeaux, and managed about fifty Panamanian companies on behalf of Swiss, French and Italian firms . . .”

  “The perfect set-up.”

  “Your friend Babette has gone where my father couldn’t go. Right to the heart of the machine. Before coming here, I reread a few passages of her draft report. She uses the South of France as an example, but what she says holds true for the whole of the European Union. I was particularly struck by the terrible contradiction she points out: that the less united the States that signed up to Maastricht are against the Mafia, the more the Mafia flourishes on the dung heap—that’s the term she uses—of obsolete and incompatible national laws.”

  “Yes,” I said, “I read that too.”

  I’d almost talked about this earlier to Fonfon and Honorine. But then I’d told myself they’d already heard enough. It didn’t tell them anything new about the mess Babette was in—the mess I was in too.

  Babette backed up her comments with statements by leading European officials. “What makes this failure of the Maastricht signatories all the more serious,” Diemut Theato, chairman of the European Parliament’s budget control committee, asserted, “is that greater and greater sacrifices are being demanded of European taxpayers, at the same time as the frauds uncovered in 1996 amount to 1.4% of the budget.” And Anita Gradin, the commissioner in charge of fraud prevention, stated, “Criminal organizations operate on the principle of minimum risk: they spread their different activities across the member States, choosing for each one that State where the risk is smallest.”

  I poured Hélène Pessayre another glass of wine.

  “It’s delicious,” she said.

  I didn’t know if she really meant it. Her thoughts seemed to be elsewhere. On Babette’s disks. Or in the place where her father had met his death. Her eyes came to rest on me. Her look was tender and affectionate. I wanted to take her in my arms and hold her. Kiss her. But that was the last thing to do.

  “We started receiving anonymous letters in the mail. I’
ve never forgotten what the last one said. ‘There’s no point in trying to protect your family, or in scattering documents all over the country. Nothing escapes us. So please see reason and drop the case.’

  “My mother refused to leave, and so did my brothers and I. We didn’t really believe in these threats. ‘They’re just trying to intimidate us,’ my father would say. Not that that stopped him from asking for police protection. The house was put under twenty-four-hour surveillance. And he had two inspectors with him everywhere he went. So did we, but more discreetly. I don’t know how long we could have gone on living like that . . .” She broke off, and looked down at the wine in her glass. “One evening, he was found in the garage of our building. In his car, with his throat cut.”

  She looked up at me. The veil had gone from her eyes, and they had regained their dark brilliance.

  “The weapon used was a double-edged knife, with a blade nearly six inches long and just one inch wide.” It was the police captain speaking now. The crime expert. “The same one used on Sonia De Luca and Georges Mavros.”

  “You don’t mean it’s the same man?”

  “No. The same weapon. The same type of knife. It struck me when I read the pathologist’s report on Sonia. It took me back eight years, you know?”

  I remembered what I’d thrown in her face on the terrace at Ange’s, and suddenly I didn’t feel proud of myself. “I’m sorry about what I said the other day.”

  She shrugged. “But it’s true, I don’t have anything else to do in my life. Only that. It was what I wanted. It was the only reason I became a cop. To fight crime. Especially organized crime. That’s my life, now.”

  How could she be so determined? The words were cold, passionless, a statement of fact.

  “You can’t live for revenge,” I said, imagining that was what drove her.

  “Who said anything about revenge? I’m not out to avenge my father’s death. All I’m trying to do is continue what he started. In my own way. In a different line of work. The killer was never arrested. In the end, the case was closed. That’s why I made the choice I did. Why I joined the police.” She drank some wine, then went on, “Revenge gets you nowhere. Neither does pessimism, like I said. You just have to be determined.” She looked at me. “And realistic.”