Solea Page 17

  “How can you be sure they were cops?”

  “You just have to look at them to know that.”

  I drank some of the coffee. “And you say the Fiat Punto wasn’t there?”

  “It still isn’t.”

  What was going on? Two days, the killer had said. I couldn’t believe he’d swallowed everything I’d told him. I knew he thought of me as just a poor shmuck, but even so!

  I had a sudden vision of horror. The killers driving up to Le Castellas to corner Babette. I shook my head, dismissing the idea. Convincing myself that my phone had only been tapped since last night, that the links between the cops and the Mafia weren’t as strong as all that. No, I thought, trying to put my mind at rest, it couldn’t have been the head of Hélène’s squad. But it could have been one of his men. Any one of them. It only took one. One who took the plunge. Just one, Goddammit!

  “Can you pass me the phone?”

  “Here you go,” Fonfon said, putting it on the counter. “You want to eat something?”

  I shrugged, and dialed the number of Le Castellas. At the other end, the phone rang six, seven, eight times. The sweat was pouring off me. Nine times.

  At last someone answered, in an authoritative-sounding voice. “Lieutenant Brémond.”

  My body went hot and cold, and my legs started shaking. They’d been there. They knew about my phone calls. I started shaking from head to foot.

  “Hello?”

  Slowly, I put down the receiver.

  “Grilled fegatelli, that O.K.?” Fonfon called from the kitchen.

  “Fine.”

  I dialed Hélène Pessayre’s number.

  “Hélène,” I said, when she answered.

  “Is everything O.K.?”

  “No. It’s not O.K. I think they’ve been up to Le Castellas, where Babette was staying. I think something’s happened. No, I don’t think it, I’m sure of it! I called, and a cop answered. Lieutenant Brémond.”

  “Where is that?”

  “The Saint-Jean-du-Gard district.”

  “I’ll call you back.” But she didn’t hang up. “Was Babette up there?”

  “No, in Nîmes. She’s in Nîmes.”

  It was a lie. Babette must have taken the train by now. At least, I hoped so.

  “Oh,” was all Hélène Pessayre said.

  She hung up.

  The smell of fegatelli was starting to spread through the bar. I wasn’t hungry, but it smelled great. I had to eat. Drink less. Eat. Smoke less.

  Eat.

  “You’ll have some, won’t you?” Fonfon asked, coming out of the kitchen.

  He put plates, glasses, knives and forks on a table facing the sea. Then he opened a bottle of Saint-Cannat rosé, a nice little wine from a cooperative, ideal for morning snacks.

  “Why didn’t you stay with her?”

  He went back into the kitchen. I heard him turning the fegatelli over on the grill. I went in to him.

  “Why, Fonfon?”

  “What?”

  “Why didn’t you stay with your cousin too?”

  He looked at me, and I couldn’t tell what was in his eyes. “I’ll tell you . . .” I saw his anger rising. “Where would Félix have called you, huh?” he exploded. “To tell you when he was taking Babette out in his boat? You asked him to call here, in my bar.”

  “He was the one who suggested it and—”

  “Right. So I guess he’s not stupid or senile either.”

  “Is that all you stayed for? I could have—”

  “Could have what? Hung around here, waiting for the phone to ring? Like now.” He turned the fegatelli over again. “Nearly ready.” He slid all of it onto a dish, took some bread, and went out to the table.

  I followed him. “Did Félix call you?”

  “No, I called him. Yesterday. Before our little conversation. I wanted to know something.”

  “What did you want to know?”

  “How serious this thing really is. So I asked him if you’d been to see him to get . . . you know, to get Manu’s gun. He told me you had. He told me everything.”

  “You already knew everything last night?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you didn’t say anything.”

  “I needed to hear it from you. I needed to hear you tell me. Me, Fonfon!”

  “Fuck it!”

  “And you know something, Fabio? I don’t think you told us everything. Neither does Félix. But he doesn’t give a damn. He told me. He may pretend, but he doesn’t care much about life anymore. You see . . . No, you don’t see. Sometimes you don’t see anything. You just pass by . . .”

  Fonfon lowered his head over the plate and started eating. I couldn’t eat. After three mouthfuls, and a lot of silence, he looked up. His eyes were misty with tears. “Eat, dammit! It’ll get cold.”

  “Fonfon . . .”

  “Let me tell you this. I’m here to . . . to be with you. But I don’t know why, Fabio. I really don’t know why! It was Honorine who asked me to stay. She wouldn’t have gone otherwise. That was her one condition. Do you hear what I’m saying?” He stood up abruptly, put his hands flat on the table, and leaned toward me. “Because if she hadn’t asked me, I don’t know if I’d have stayed.”

  He went to the kitchen. I stood up and went to join him. He was standing with his head against the freezer, crying. I put my arms around his shoulders. “Fonfon,” I said.

  He turned slowly, and I hugged him. He was still crying, like a little boy.

  What a mess, Babette. What a mess.

  But Babette wasn’t responsible for all this. She was just the catalyst. And I was discovering my true nature. Someone who didn’t pay any attention even to those he loved. Someone who didn’t listen to their anxieties, their fears. Their desire to live, and be happy, a little while longer. I was living in a world that had no room for them. I rubbed shoulders with them, but I didn’t share. I took everything they gave me, without really caring, and if ever they said or did anything I didn’t like, I’d let it go, out of pure laziness.

  When you came down to it, that was why Lole had left me. Because of the way I passed people by, apathetic, unconcerned. Uninterested. Even at the worst times, I didn’t know how to show them how fond of them I really was. I didn’t know how to say it either. I thought things like friendship and love were obvious. Hélène Pessayre was right. I hadn’t given everything to Lole. I’d never given everything to anyone.

  I’d lost Lole. And now I was losing Fonfon and Honorine. And that was the worst thing that could happen. Because without them, I’d be without my last bearings. They were beacons at sea, lighting me the way to harbor. Showing me my route.

  “I love you, both of you. I love you, Fonfon.”

  He lifted his eyes to me, then freed himself. “All right, all right,” he said.

  “You’re all I have left, dammit!”

  “Oh, yes!” His anger exploded again. “Now you remember! Now that we’re almost like family! But the killers are out there, prowling . . . And the cops are tapping your phone without telling that captain of yours . . . You’re worried, of course, you even go to get a gun. But what about us? Are you worried about us? Oh, no! We just have to wait until Monsieur sorts it all out. Until everything goes back to normal. And afterwards, if we’re still alive, we’ll go back to our old routine. Fishing, aperitifs, pétanque, rummy in the evening . . . Is that it, Fabio? Is that how you see things? Who are we to you, huh? Tell us that!”

  “No,” I said in a low voice. “That’s not how I see things.”

  “O.K., so how do you see them, huh?”

  The phone rang.

  “Montale?”

  Hélène Pessayre’s voice was flat. Toneless.

  “Yup.”

  “Around seven o’clock this morning, Bruno went crazy
. . .”

  I closed my eyes. The images came charging into my head. Not even images, just rivers of blood.

  “He killed his wife and his two children. With . . . with an axe. It’s . . .”

  She couldn’t say anything more.

  “What about him, Hélène?”

  “He hanged himself. Simple as that.”

  Fonfon came up to me quietly, and placed a glass of rosé in front of me. I drank it in one go, and made a sign for him to pour me another. He put the bottle next to me.

  “What do the cops say?”

  “They’re classing it as a domestic.”

  I drank another glass of rosé. “Of course.”

  “According to witnesses, things hadn’t been going too well between Bruno and his wife for some time . . . Apparently, there’d been a lot of talk in the village about this woman who was living in their house.”

  “That’d surprise me. No one knew Babette was in Le Castellas.”

  “There are witnesses, Montale. At least one. An old friend of Bruno’s. The park ranger.”

  “Of course,” I repeated.

  “They’ve issued your friend’s description. They’d like to talk to her.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means she has the cops on her trail, and behind them the Mafia guys. The killer, just waiting to trap her.”

  If Bruno had talked—and there was no way he hadn’t—the Mafiosi must have charged down to Nîmes, where Babette was supposed to be spending the night with friends. I hoped she’d left before they got there. For her sake. And the sake of her hosts. I hoped she was already on the train.

  “Montale, where is she?”

  “I don’t know. I really don’t. She might be on a train. She was due to be coming to Marseilles today. She’s supposed to be phoning me when she arrives.”

  “Did you have anything planned for when she arrives?”

  “Yes.”

  “And was calling me part of your plan?”

  “Not straight away. Later.”

  I heard her breathing.

  “I’m sending a team to the station. In case those scumbags are there and try something.”

  “I’d prefer it if she wasn’t followed.”

  “Are you afraid I’ll find out where she’s going?”

  My turn to take a deep breath. “Yes,” I said. “It’ll endanger someone else. And you aren’t sure of anything. Or anybody. Not even your closest colleague, Béraud, am I right?”

  “I know where she’s going, Montale. I think I know where you’re going to meet her tonight.”

  I poured myself another glass of wine. I felt unsteady on my feet. “Did you have me followed?”

  “No. I was ahead of you. You told me the person you were supposed to see, Félix, lived in Vallon-des-Auffes. I sent Béraud. He was walking around the harbor when you got there.”

  “You didn’t trust me, huh?”

  “I still don’t. But it’s better this way. For now. Each of us playing our own game. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

  I heard her breathing again, as if she was suffocating. When she spoke again, her voice was lower, huskier. “I still hope we can see each other when all this is over.”

  “I hope so too, Hélène.”

  “I’ve never been as sincere with a man as I was with you last night.”

  She hung up.

  Fonfon was sitting at the table. He hadn’t finished his fegatelli, and I hadn’t even started mine. He watched me as I walked toward him. He looked exhausted.

  “Fonfon, go join Honorine. Tell her I’m the one who decides. Not her. Tell her I want you to be together. There’s nothing for you to do here!”

  “How about you?”

  “I’m going to wait for Félix to call me, and then I’ll close the bar. Leave me a number where I can reach you.”

  He stood up, and looked me straight in the eyes. “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to kill a man, Fonfon. I’m going to kill a man.”

  20.

  IN WHICH THERE IS NO TRUTH THAT DOESN’T

  CARRY WITHIN IT ITS OWN BITTERNESS

  Now that the mistral had died down, the smell of burning hung in the air. An acrid mixture of wood, resin, and chemicals. The firefighters seemed finally to have gotten the fire under control. The talk now was of eight thousand, five hundred and twenty acres destroyed. Mainly forest. Someone on the radio, I couldn’t remember who, had mentioned the figure of a million trees burned. Which made this fire comparable to the one in 1989.

  After a short nap, I’d set off for a walk in the calanques. I needed to cleanse my mind with the beauty of the landscape. To empty it of nasty thoughts, and fill it with sublime images. I also needed to fill my poor lungs with some clean air.

  I’d started out from the harbor of Calelongue, close by Les Goudes. An easy walk, only two hours, along the customs path. With magnificent views of the Riou archipelago and the southern slopes of the calanques. When I got to the Plan des Cailles, I turned off the path into the woods above the calanque of Les Queyrons, staying close to the sea. I’d come to a halt, sweating and panting, at the end of the coastal path overlooking the calanque of Podestat.

  It felt good to be up here, facing the sea. In the silence. There was nothing to understand here, nothing to know. Everything was just there to be seen and enjoyed.

  Just before I left, Félix had phoned. It was a little before two o’clock. Babette had just arrived. He put her on. She hadn’t taken the train at Nîmes after all. When she got to the station, she told me, she’d had a kind of premonition. She’d gone into a car rental office, and had come out at the wheel of a Peugeot 205. Once in Marseilles, she’d parked her car in the harbor area and taken a bus up onto the Corniche. Then she’d walked down to Vallon-des-Auffes.

  I’d closed the bar, pulled the shutters over the windows that looked out to sea, and let down the metal shutter. The room was only dimly lit now by a skylight above the front door.

  “I needed that,” she began. “To let the city enter me. To be filled with its light. I even stopped at La Samaritaine for a drink and a bite to eat. I was thinking of you. Of what you often say. That you can’t understand anything about this city if you’re indifferent to its light.”

  “Babette . . .”

  “I love this city. I watched the people around me. On the terrace. On the street. Envying them. They were alive. Their lives may be good or bad, they may have their ups and downs, like everyone. But they were alive . . . I felt like someone from another planet.”

  “Babette . . .”

  “Wait . . . I took off my sunglasses and closed my eyes and felt the sun on my face, the way you do when you’re on the beach. I was starting to be myself again. I told myself, ‘You’re home.’ But, you know what, Fabio?”

  “What?”

  “It isn’t true. I’m not really at home here anymore. I can’t walk down the street without wondering if I’m being followed.”

  She’d fallen silent for a moment. I’d pulled on the phone wire and sat down on the floor, with my back against the counter. I was tired. I was sleepy. I needed air. The one thing I didn’t want was to hear what she was going to say, which I could sense coming with every word she spoke.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Babette said. Her voice was strangely calm, which made it all the more unbearable. “I’ll never feel at home again in Marseilles if I give up on the investigation. I’ve spent years working on it. I have to see it through. People here are like that, they always have to see things through, even if they sometimes take them to extremes. Even if it proves their undoing . . .”

  “Babette, I don’t want to discuss this over the phone.”

  “I wanted you to know, Fabio. Last night, I’d come to the conclusion that you were right. I’d weighed it all up. But
. . . coming here . . . the pleasure of feeling the sun on my skin, the light in my eyes . . . I know I’m right.”

  “Do you have the papers with you?” I cut in. “The originals?”

  “No. They’re in a safe place.”

  “Dammit, Babette!” I cried.

  “There’s no point in getting worked up about it, that’s how it is. How can we live happily if every time we go somewhere or buy something, we know we’re being fucked by the Mafia? Huh? Really fucked!”

  Whole sections of her report passed in front of my eyes. As if, that night at Cyril’s, I’d inserted the computer’s hard disk in my head.

  It is in the tax havens that the crime syndicates make contact with the world’s great commercial banks through their local subsidiaries, which specialize in offering a discreet, personalized service to those with high-yield accounts. The opportunities for tax evasion are seized upon by both legitimate businesses and criminal organizations. New developments in banking techniques and telecommunications in fact offer many opportunities for the rapid circulation and disappearance of profits from illegal transactions.

  “Fabio?”

  I blinked.

  The money can easily be moved by electronic transfer from the parent company to a subsidiary registered as a dummy company in a tax haven. Billions of dollars coming from banks managing institutional funds—including pension funds, savings banks and treasury funds—circulate in this way, moving into accounts registered in Luxemburg, the Channel Islands, the Cayman Islands, and so on.

  As a consequence of tax evasion, the accumulation in tax havens of enormous capital reserves belonging to large companies is also responsible for the increase in the budget deficit of most Western countries . . .

  “That’s not the question,” I said.

  “Oh, really? Then what is?”

  She hadn’t talked about Bruno. I assumed she didn’t know anything about the massacre. I decided I wouldn’t say anything. Not for the moment. I’d keep that atrocity as my trump card. When we finally met. Tonight.

  “It’s not a question. I know I’ll never be happy again if . . . if those scumbags do what they did to Sonia and Mavros, and cut Honorine’s and Fonfon’s throats!”