Solea (12 page)

“I swallowed it all,” he'd told me. “Hungary, Czechoslovakia, the positive achievements of socialism.”

He handed me the glass, without looking at me. I could guess what was going through his head. What he was feeling. His daughter in my arms. His daughter beneath me, as we made love. I didn't know if he'd really have liked it, the two of us together.

“Nothing happened, you know. We were supposed to meet, and . . .”

“Forget it, Montale. All that, now . . .”

He took a swig of his
pastis
, and finally looked at me. “Do you have children?”

“No.”

“Then you can't understand.”

I swallowed. His grief was clearly etched on his face, and hovered around his eyes. I was sure we'd have been friends, even if I'd started something with Sonia. I'd have invited him over for dinner with Fonfon and Honorine.

“I think she and I could have had something solid. With the boy.”

“Have you ever been married?”

“No, never.”

“You must have known a few women in your time.”

“It's not what you think, De Luca.”

“I don't think anything. In any case . . .” He emptied his glass. “Another one?”

“A small one.”

“She was never happy. The only men she met were jerks. Can you explain it to me, Montale? Beautiful, intelligent, and never met anything but jerks. I won't even tell you about the last one, the father of . . .” He made a gesture with his head toward the room where Enzo was sleeping. “A good thing he walked out, or I'd have killed him sooner or later.”

“There's no explanation.”

“No. I think we spend our lives losing our way and by the time we find it, it's too late.”

He looked at me again. There were the beginnings of tears in his eyes, but there was also a glimmer of friendship.

“My life exactly,” I said.

My heart started pounding, then contracted. Somewhere, Lole must be squeezing it. She'd been a hundred per cent right about me, I didn't understand a thing. Loving another person surely meant showing yourself naked to that person. Naked in your strength, and in your weakness. Was that what scared me about love? The nakedness of it? The truth of it? Truth itself?

I'd have told Sonia everything. Even that contraction in my heart whose name was Lole. Yes, as I'd just told De Luca, Sonia and I could have had something solid. Something different. Joy and laughter. Happiness. But different. It had to be different. When the woman you've dreamed about, waited for, desired for years, then met and loved, leaves you, you can't imagine you'll meet her again like that, on some other street corner of your life. Everyone knows there's no lost property office for love.

Sonia would have understood. She hadn't taken long to make my heart speak, or just to make me speak. And perhaps there would have been a future for us. A future true to our desires.

“Yes,” De Luca said, again emptying his glass.

I stood up.

“Is that all you came here for—to tell me it was you?”

“Yes,” I lied. “To tell you that.”

Painfully, he got to his feet.

“Does the boy know?”

“Not yet. I don't know how . . . And I don't know how I'm going to manage with him . . . I mean, one night, one day. One week, during the vacation . . . But bringing him up? I wrote to my wife . . .”

“Can I go say good night to him?”

De Luca nodded. But then he put his hand on my arm. All the sadness in him was about to explode. His chest rose. He'd put up a barrier of pride around him, and now the tears were bursting through.

“Why?” He started crying. “Why did they kill her? Why her?”

“I don't know,” I said, in a very low voice.

I drew him to me, and held him in my arms. He was sobbing loudly. I said again as low as possible, “I don't know.”

His tears of love for Sonia—big, hot, sticky tears—ran down my neck. They stank of death. The same stench I'd smelled the other night, going into Hassan's. Exactly the same smell. In my mind's eye, I tried to put a face to Sonia's killer.

Then I saw Enzo, standing there in front of us, holding a little teddy bear under his arm.

“Why's Grandpa crying?”

I freed myself from De Luca, squatted in front of Enzo, and put my arms around his shoulders.

“Your mommy won't be coming back,” I said. “She . . . she had an accident. Do you understand, Enzo? She's dead.”

And I started crying too. Crying for us, who would have to survive all this. The world's ever-present corruption.

F
onfon, Honorine and I had played rummy until midnight. Playing cards with those two was more than a pleasure. It was a way to get closer. To share feelings we found hard to express in words. As we played, we exchanged looks, smiles. And although it was a simple game, you had to keep track of the cards the others had played. It was a good opportunity to keep my mind off things for a few hours.

Fonfon had brought along a bottle of Bunan. An old stemmed
marc
from La Cadière, near Bandol.

“Taste this,” he'd said. “It'll make a change from that Scotch of yours.”

It was delicious. Quite different from my Lagavulin with its slightly peaty taste. The Bunan was dry, but extremely fruity, smelling of scrubland. By the time I'd won two games of rummy and lost eight, I'd already enjoyed four little glasses of it.

As we were saying good night, Honorine came up to me with a padded envelope.

“I almost forgot. The postman left this for you this morning. As it was marked fragile, he didn't want to put it in your mail box.”

There was no indication of the sender on the back. The postmark said Saint-Jean-du-Gard. I opened the envelope and took out five computer disks. Two blue, one white, one red, one black.
I still love you
, Babette had written on a sheet of paper. And underneath:
Take good care of this for me.

Babette! The blood started beating in my temples. At the same time, Sonia's face flashed in front of me. Sonia with her throat cut. I had a clear memory of Sonia's neck. Tanned, like her skin. Thin. It looked as soft as the shoulder where I'd placed my hand for a brief moment. A neck it would have been nice to kiss, there, just below the ear. Or stroke with your fingertips, and marvel at the softness. How I'd have liked to hate Babette!

But how do you go about hating someone you love? Or someone you once loved? A friend or a lover. Mavros or Lole. I couldn't do it, any more than I could have done without the friendship of Manu and Ugo. You can stop yourself seeing them, keeping in touch with them, but you can't hate them, it's impossible. For me at least.

I reread Babette's note, and felt the weight of the disks. This was it, I thought, our fates were linked, in the most horrible way possible. Babette was appealing to love, but it was death that was rearing its head. To the death. That's what we used to say when we were kids. We'd make a little cut in our wrists, and cross our forearms, so that one's person's wrist was against the other's, and our blood mingled. Friends for life. Brothers. We'd always love each other.

Babette. For years, we'd brought each other nothing but our mutual desire. And our mutual solitude. Her words
I still love you
made me uncomfortable. They didn't strike a chord with me. Was she sincere? I wondered. Or was it the only way she knew to call for help? I was only too well aware that you could say things, think they were true in the moment you said them, and then do things, in the hours or days that followed, that belied them. Especially in love. Because love is the most irrational of feelings, and its source—whatever people say—is in the meeting of two bodies, and the pleasure they give each other.

One day, Lole had packed her bag, and said, “I'm going away. I may be gone for a week.”

I looked at her for a long time, my stomach in knots. Usually, she would say things like, “I'm going to see my mother,” or “My sister isn't well. I'm going to Toulouse for a few days.”

“I need to think, Fabio. I really need it. For myself. You understand, I need to think about myself.”

She was tense, having to say it like that. She'd have liked to find a better moment to tell me, to explain. I understood her tension, even though it hurt me. I'd been planning—but as usual, I hadn't said anything—to take her on an excursion into the countryside inland from Nice. Over toward Gorbio, Sainte-Agnes, Sospel.

“If that's what you want to do.”

She was leaving to join her friend. The guitarist she'd met at a concert in Seville, when she was visiting with her mother. She hadn't told me until she got back.

“I didn't do anything to . . .” she'd said. “I didn't think it would happen so fast, Fabio.”

I held her in my arms. Her body felt stiff against mine. I knew then that she'd been thinking a lot about us, and about herself. But of course not the way I'd imagined. Nor the way I'd heard in what she'd said before she left.

“What are those?” Honorine asked.

“Computer disks.”

“Do you know about that kind of thing?”

“A little. I used to have a computer in my office.”

I embraced the two of them and said good night. I was in a hurry to go.

“Even if you leave early,” Fonfon said, “come and see me first.”

“I promise.”

I was already thinking about something else. About the disks and what was in them. The reason for the mess Babette was in. The mess she was dragging me into. Whatever it was had cost Sonia her life. And had delivered a knockout blow to an eight-year-old boy and his poor lost grandfather.

 

I called Hassan. When he picked up, I recognized the first notes of “In a Sentimental Mood” in the background. I recognized the sound, too. John Coltrane and Duke Ellington. A real gem.

“Is Sébastien there, by any chance?”

“Sure. I'll call him over.”

Over the years, I'd gotten friendly with a group of friends who often came to Hassan's. Sébastien, Mathieu, Régis and Cédric. They were all twenty-five. Mathieu and Régis were finishing their architecture studies. Cédric was a painter, and had recently been organizing techno concerts. Sébastien was moonlighting on construction sites. The friendship between them warmed my heart. You could almost touch it, even if you couldn't explain it. That was how I'd been with Manu and Ugo. We'd stagger every night from one bar to the next, laughing about everything, even the girls we were going out with. We were different and yet we had the same dreams. Just like these four young guys. And like them, we knew that we couldn't have had the same conversations with anyone else.

“Yes?” Sébastien said.

“Montale here. I'm not breaking anything up, I hope?”

“No. The girls are washing their hair. There's just the four of us here.”

“Your cousin Cyril. Do you think he could open some disks for me?”

Sébastien had told me Cyril was a computer freak. With an incredible amount of equipment. Always surfing the net at night.

“No sweat. When?”

“Now.”

“Now? Shit, man, this is worse than when you were a cop!”

“You said it.”

“O.K. We'll wait for you. We still have four rounds on account!”

It took me less than twenty minutes to get there. All the lights were green, except for three that I ran when they were still amber. There were no traffic cops around. Hassan's bar wasn't exactly packed. Sébastien and his friends. Three couples. And a regular, a tired looking man of about thirty who came in every week to read
Taktik
, the free cultural paper, from cover to cover. I assumed he couldn't actually afford a ticket to a concert, or even a movie.

“If you can get rid of them for me,” Hassan said, indicating the four young guys, “I'll be able to close.”

“Cyril's expecting us,” Sébastien said. “Whenever you like. He lives just around the corner. Boulevard Chave.”

“Can I buy you all another round?”

“Well, if we're working at night, that's the least we can expect.”

“Right, this is the last one,” Hassan said. “Bring your glasses.”

He poured me a whisky. Without asking. The same kind he'd served Sonia. An Oban. He made an exception and poured himself one too. He raised his glass as if in a toast. We looked at each other. We were thinking the same thing. About the same person. We didn't need words. It was the same way with Fonfon and Honorine. There are no words to speak about Evil.

Hassan had let the Coltrane-Ellington album run on. The track called
Angelica
was just starting. A track all about love. Joy. Happiness. So light, it could reconcile any human sadness with the flight of a seagull to other shores.

“Another one?”

“A quick one. A round for the boys, too.”

 

The five disks contained pages and pages of documents. They had been compressed to contain as much information as possible.

“Will you be O.K.?” Cyril asked.

I was sitting in front of his computer, starting to scroll through the files on the blue disks. “I'll only need an hour. I'm not going to read everything. Just find a few things I need.”

“Take your time. We have enough here to withstand a siege!”

They'd brought back several six-packs of beer, pizzas, and enough cigarettes to last all night. The way they'd started, they were going to remake the world four or five times over. And, given what I was seeing in front of my eyes right now, the world could certainly do with being remade.

Out of curiosity, I opened the first file.
How organized crime is poisoning the world economy.
This was clearly a draft of Babette's report.