Solea (15 page)

There is a close connection
,
 
Babette wrote,
between world debt, illegal trade and money laundering. Since the debt crisis at the beginning of the 1980s, the price of raw materials has plummeted, bringing about a dramatic downturn in the fortunes of developing countries. As a result of austerity measures imposed by international creditors, state employees have been dismissed, nationalized companies sold off, public investment frozen, and funds to farmers and industrialists reduced. With rampant unemployment and falling wages, the legal economy is in crisis.

This was the point we'd reached, I'd told myself during the night, reading these words. What we called the future was all mapped out. A new age of human misery. How much had they fined that housewife who'd stolen a few steaks from a supermarket? How many months of prison had they given those kids in Strasbourg for breaking windows on buses and in bus shelters?

I remembered what Fonfon had said. A newspaper without morality isn't a newspaper anymore. Right, and a society without morality isn't a society anymore. Same with a country. It was easier to send the cops to throw the committees of the unemployed out of welfare offices than to tackle the roots of the evil. This corruption that was eating away at mankind.

“More than two years ago we froze money that came from a big drug deal in France,”
Bernard Bertossa, the public prosecutor of Geneva, said at the end of his interview with Babette
. “The perpetrators have been sentenced, but the French legal system still hasn't presented any demand for restitution, despite repeated requests.”
 

Yes, this was the point we'd reached, the lowest point of morality.

I looked at Hélène Pessayre. “It'd take too long to explain. Read it if you can. I didn't get any farther than the list of names. I didn't really have the guts to know the rest. I wasn't sure that, if I did, I'd still feel happy sitting on my terrace looking at the sea.”

She smiled. “Where did you get these disks?”

“A friend of mine sent them to me. A journalist named Babette Bellini. She's spent the last few years investigating all this. It's an obsession.”

“How are the deaths of Sonia De Luca and Georges Mavros connected with this?”

“The Mafia don't know where Babette is. They'd like to get their hands on her. There are certain papers they want to get back. I think it's the lists they're interested in. The lists of banks, individual account numbers.”

I closed my eyes for a moment and saw Babette, her smile. “Then they'll kill her, of course,” I said.

“And where do you fit in?”

“The killers have asked me to find her. As an incentive, they're killing off the people I love. And they're going to carry on until they get to the people who mean the most to me.”

“Did you love Sonia?”

There was no harshness in her voice now. She was a woman talking to a man. About a man and another woman. Almost as if we were old friends.

I shrugged. “I wanted to see her again.”

“Is that all?”

“No, that's not all,” I replied sharply.

“What else?”

She was sympathetic but insistent. Forcing me to talk about what I'd felt that night. My stomach clenched.

“It wasn't just desire!” I said, raising my voice. “Do you understand? I really felt we might have a future. We might even live together.”

“All in one night?”

“One night or a hundred, one look or a thousand, it makes no difference.” By now, I wanted to scream.

“Montale,” she said quietly, and her voice had a calming effect on me. I liked the way she said my name. It seemed to carry in it all the joy, all the laughter of her summers in Algiers.

“I think you know immediately, when you meet someone, if you just want to get laid, or to start something real. Don't you?”

“Yes, I think so, too,” she said, without taking her eyes off me. “Are you unhappy, Montale?”

Fuck! Did I have unhappiness written all over my face? Sonia had said the same thing to Honorine the other day. Now Hélène Pessayre was flinging the word at me. Had Lole really drained me of happiness? Had she really taken all my dreams away with her? All my reasons for living? Or was it just that I didn't know where to find them inside me?

After Pascale left him, Mavros had told me, “You know, it was like she was turning the pages really fast. Five years of laughter, joy, shouting matches sometimes, love, tenderness, nights, mornings, siestas, dreams, journeys . . . Until we got to the words The End. Which she wrote herself, with her own hand. And then she took the book away with her. And I . . .”

He was crying. I listened to him in silence. Helpless, faced with so much pain.

“And now I've lost my reason for living. I'd never loved a woman the way I loved Pascale. She was the only one, Fabio, the only one, Goddammit! Now I'm just going through the motions. Because you have to do things. That's what life is. Doing things. But in my head, there's nothing left. Or in my heart.” He'd put his finger on his head, then his heart. “Nothing.”

I didn't know what to say. There was nothing you could say in response to something like that. As I was to find out when Lole left.

That night, I'd taken Mavros home with me. Stopping off along the way at a whole lot of bars in the harbor area. From the Café de la Mairie to the Bar de la Marine. Hassan's, too, for a while.

I'd laid him on the couch, with my bottle of Lagavulin within easy reach. “Will you be O.K.?”

“I have everything I need,” he'd said, pointing to the bottle.

Then I'd left him and slipped into bed against Lole's warm, soft body. I lay with my cock against her buttocks and one hand on her breast, holding her the way a child learning to swim holds on to his rubber ring. Clinging on for dear life. It was only Lole's love that kept my head above water. Otherwise, I'd have sunk. Or been carried away by the current.

“You still haven't answered,” Hélène Pessayre said.

“I think I need a lawyer.”

She laughed, which did me good.

There was a knock at the door.

“Yes?”

It was Béraud, from her team.

“We've finished, captain.” He looked at me. “Can he identify him?”

“Yes,” I said. “I'll do it.”

“Give us a few more minutes, Alain.”

He went out and closed the door.

Hélène Pessayre stood up and took a few steps around the cramped office. Then she came and stood in front of me. “If you found this Babette Bellini, would you tell me?”

“Yes,” I replied, without hesitation, looking her straight in the eyes.

I stood up too. We were face to face, the way we'd been before she slapped me. There was a vital question I had to ask her. “And what do we do then? If I find her?”

For the first time, I sensed an uncertainty in her. As if she knew what I was going to say next.

“You'd give her police protection. Is that it? Until you arrested the killers, if you could find them. And then what? What happens when other killers arrive? And then others?”

It was my way of slapping her in the face. Cops didn't like to hear they were powerless.

“You'll be transferred before that happens, not to Saint-Brieuc, like Loubet, but to Argenton-sur-Creuse or some other one-horse town!”

She went pale, and I regretted losing my temper with her. It was a mean thing to do in revenge for that slap.

“I'm sorry.”

“Do you have an idea?” she asked me, coldly. “A plan?”

“No, I don't have a plan. I just want to find the guy who killed Sonia and Georges. And kill him.”

“That's really stupid.”

“Maybe it is. But it's the only way a piece of shit like that will get what he deserves.”

“What I meant was, it's really stupid of you to risk your life.” She rested her dark eyes on me, and there was a gentleness in them. “Unless you really are that unhappy.”

T
he fire sirens jolted me awake. The air coming in through the window smelled of burning. Hot, foul air. I learned later that the fire had started in a garbage dump in Septèmes-les-Vallons, a village just north of Marseilles. Not far from here, from George's apartment.

“They're tailing me,” I'd said to Hélène Pessayre. “I'm sure of it. Sonia came back with me the other night. She slept in my house. All they had to do was follow her home. I was the one who led them to Mavros. Any time I go see a friend, sooner or later he's going to end up on their list.”

We were still in Mavros's office. Trying to figure out a plan. To get me out of the fix I was in. The killer would call again this evening. He was expecting results. He wanted me to tell him where Babette was, or something similar. If I couldn't give him any assurances, he'd kill someone else. Maybe Fonfon or Honorine, if he didn't find one of my old party buddies to kill first.

“I'm stuck here,” I'd lied to her. That was less than an hour ago. “I can't make a move without endangering the life of someone close to me.”

She looked at me. I was starting to know those looks of hers. This one wasn't a completely trusting look. Her doubts persisted. “Actually, that's lucky for us.”

“What is?”

“The fact that you can't make a move,” she replied, with a touch of irony. “I mean, the fact that they have to tail you is their weak point.”

I saw what she was getting at, and I didn't like it. “I don't follow you.”

“Stop treating me like an idiot, Montale! You know perfectly well what I mean. They follow you, we'll be right behind them.”

“And pounce on them at the first red light, is that it?”

I immediately regretted saying that. There was a veil of sadness over her eyes.

“I'm sorry, Hélène.”

“Give me a cigarette.”

I held out my pack. “Don't you ever buy any?”

“You always have some. And . . . we seem to be seeing a lot of each other, don't we?”

She said it without smiling, and her voice was weary.

“Montale,” she continued softly, “we'll never get anywhere if you don't”—she took a long drag on her cigarette as she searched for the words—“if you don't believe in me. Not as a cop. As a woman. I thought you'd have understood that, after our conversation by the sea.”

“What should I have understood?”

The words had slipped out. No sooner had I said them than they started echoing cruelly in my head. I'd said exactly the same thing to Lole, that terrible night when she'd told me it was all over. The years were passing, and I was still asking the same question. I still understood nothing about life. “The reason we keep coming back to the same place,” I'd said to Mavros one night, after Pascale had left, “is because we're going around in circles. Because we're lost . . .” He'd nodded. He was going around in circles. He was lost. It's easier to explain these things to other people, I thought, than to understand them yourself.

Hélène Pessayre smiled just the way Lole had. Her answer was a little different. “Why don't you trust women? What have they done to you? Haven't they given you enough? Have they disappointed you? They've made you suffer, is that it?”

Once again, she'd thrown me completely. “Maybe. Yes.”

“Men have disappointed me too. They've made me suffer. Does that mean I have to hate all men?”

“I don't hate women.”

“Let me tell you something, Montale. Sometimes, when you look at me, I feel as if I've been turned upside down. I feel all this emotion welling up in me.”

“Hélène,” I tried to interrupt her.

“Shut up, dammit! When you look at a woman, me or any woman, you go straight to the crux of things. But you also bring along your fears, your doubts, your anxieties, all the crap that's got your heart in a vise, all the things that make you say, ‘It won't work, it'll never work.' Never the certainty that happiness is possible.”

“What about you, do you believe in happiness?”

“I believe in genuine relationships between people. Between men and women. Without fear, which means without lies.”

“Right. And where does that get us?”

“It gets us to this. Why are you so determined to kill that guy, that hitman?”

“Because of Sonia. And now because of Mavros.”

“Mavros, I can understand. He was your friend. But Sonia? I already asked you if you loved her. Is that what you felt that night? That you loved her? You didn't answer. You just said you wanted to see her again.”

“Yes, I wanted to see her. And . . .”

“And then maybe . . . perhaps . . . who knows? The usual things, right? And you set off to see her again, with part of you incapable of hearing what it was she wanted, what she was expecting of you. Have you ever really been able to give? To give everything to a woman?”

“Yes,” I said, thinking how much I'd loved Lole.

Hélène Pessayre gave me a tender look. Like the other day on the terrace at Ange's, when she'd put her hand on mine. But she wasn't about to say, “I love you” any more than she had the last time. Or come and snuggle in my arms. I was sure of that.

“You may believe that, Montale. But I don't believe you. And that woman didn't believe it either. You didn't give her your trust. You didn't tell her you believed in her. You didn't show it either. Not enough, anyway.”

“Why should I trust you?” I said. “Because that's what you're getting at, isn't it? That's what you're asking me. To trust you.”

“Yes. For once in your life, Montale. Trust a woman. Trust me. And then I can trust you. If the two of us can figure out a plan, I want to be sure of you. I want to be sure of your reasons for killing that guy.”