Arab Jazz (13 page)

12

Jean is wandering, drifting, roaming. After leaving Rachel at the Boeuf-Couronné he hadn’t been able to go home, despite his exhaustion. He knows he won’t get to sleep before 2:00 a.m. He would love to get laid. Nothing fancy—just fuck, think about nothing and forget. Forget himself in a hole. Yeah, yeah. Guy thoughts. The words are still echoing in his mind when a vision of his mother appears. Without a word. Just that weary expression of hers which means “You men, typical . . . always about you and your needs. And we put up with it. We have to accept you just as you are—dirty.” But he’s aware that women need to get laid too. Shit, he knows that from experience. But they are a different category of woman. Tarts, harlots, women who like a bit of “that” . . .

THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE

The filmmaker Eustache wasn’t the first to come up with that. But how do you get shot of all that? Hey? How do you love, how do you desire a woman who’ll love you back? A normal woman, that’s all! How? Can someone please explain that one to him? And worst of all—he can’t even manage hookers. Never gone there. Conveniently enough, his meandering has taken him to les Halles and—as if by chance—rue Saint-Denis. He inspects the announcements.

THAI MASSAGE

TOTAL RELAXATION

“HAPPY ENDING GUARANTEED”

30 EUROS

Temptation itself. But no.
I’m a policeman. I’m forbidden from going into such places. Unless it’s official police business. And it’s bad, too. The women are exploited. It’s bad
. His mother there in the background throughout. But not just her. His father was a Breton communist. Even worse than a Catholic—no confession for a commie; no means of escape. The priest is in your head; a political commissar instead of a superego. Contemplating this as he walks, he realizes he has left the high-risk neighborhood. No longer any desire to seek comfort there. He’d feel dreadful afterward. He decides to spare himself the experience.

For a long, long time, temptation has never been far from his mind, ever since those first dark nights. Before that, even. The brutal pleasure he got from toasting ants with his magnifying glass in the sun. He never felt that guilty. No, it was puberty that spoiled everything. Why? His mother’s view of him must have altered, tightened ever so slightly. And it was within its limited scope that he continued to exist. Occasionally a quiet voice would whisper: “If you’re going to feel so shitty, being the typical male pig that you are, you might as well go the whole way and stop feeling guilty!” But no, it was beyond him. He’d had girlfriends from time to time, until they got fed up feeling so dirty after sex. Years ago a girl once said to him: “I feel like you hate me!” He had insisted over and over that he didn’t, that he’d wanted to make her come but that he couldn’t—that he’d blown his load too quickly . . .”I don’t give a shit about that—if I wanted a guaranteed orgasm I wouldn’t ask a man! It’s the way you look at me as if I’m the biggest slut of all time; as if I’d forced you to do something filthy . . . That’s what I can’t stand!”

He never saw her again. The conversation came flooding back to him. He was lost—totally lost. He desperately wanted to scream, to cry. Not in the street, though. And screaming, that would be fine; but crying, letting the tears flow . . . What was that like?

He stops abruptly. He feels distraught. Arts et Métiers. What am I doing here? On rue au Maire there are some old-style Chinese restaurants. Real country bumpkin clientele. Go on then, let’s see if one is still open! A Tsingtao and some lychees—something to mellow him out. He passes Tango—has some memory of an Afro-Caribbean club, from when he first arrived in Paris. It was a nightmare. He hadn’t been able to dance and had to watch his girlfriend grinding up against hot, gyrating West Indian guys. He looks up instinctively. A rectangular screen with flashing red lights reads: “Gay and Lesbian Club.” That does it. He flops against the side of a building. He feels like his head might explode. Boom! Splinters of skull everywhere; brain smeared all over the gray wall . . . He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. He remembers the tips on the leaflet about relaxation that Léna gave him one day when he was stressed. He holds the air in his lungs and slowly counts to five, then breathes out. Slowly, slowly. He repeats the drill three times. When he comes to, a blond uniformed policewoman with blue eyes is looking at him—strangely, with the same kind of blue eyes as the European garbage collectors employed by the city council in Paris. The police car is parked on the corner by a
tabac
where her colleagues have gone to get their provisions.

“Everything alright, monsieur?”

Jean smiles at her, employing one of his many deceptive grins, and takes out his ID.

“Yeah I’m fine, thanks. Bit of a rough day, that’s all.”

“Oh, Lieutenant, you’re one of us! Lucky you! I’m desperate to take the exam to get to your level, but with my hours, and with work being so tiring, I’ve never gotten around to it. Have a good night, Lieutenant! Go and rest if it’s been a tough day . . .”

“Thank you, Officer. Good night to you too.”

She moves on. Jean peels himself away from the wall and takes a couple of steps before turning around and shouting out to the young uniformed policewoman.

“Hey! Mademoiselle!”

She comes back toward him, stopping half a yard away.

“Yes?”

“Don’t lose hope! If you really, really want it, that is. Don’t lose hope!”

There is a thinly veiled violence in his voice. It is bristling down his entire body. Without giving her any time to respond, Jean wheels around suddenly. Speechless, she watches him fade into the night, wondering whether becoming a lieutenant is in fact all it’s cracked up to be. She heads back to her fellow patrol officers. At least with them she can have a bit of a laugh!

Jean really needs that beer. He falls into the first dive he comes across. No decoration whatsoever, except the obligatory shrine comprising a chubby Buddha and red lighting. Gouged wooden tables and cafeteria chairs.
No way! They must’ve scrounged these off the local school!
he thinks to himself. He can scarcely believe his eyes, four Chinese men are playing mah-jong. As if they’d never left Macau. The cliché strikes him with a powerful sense of unreality. It actually releases some of his tension. He’s somewhere else; it’s okay. Concentrating very hard, the players don’t pay the white policeman the slightest attention. A young woman in a dark skirt emerges from the storeroom, her flip-flops clacking on the black-and-white concrete floor. She looks at him for a moment before speaking.

“Yes, sir, what would you like?”

To take you from behind back there in the storeroom—you pushed up against the beer crates and me fucking you up the ass. Not dry, oh no. I want to work it in with your saliva on my fingers.

“A Chinese beer, please. A large one. And some prawn crackers.”

“Take a seat, sir.”

The well-rehearsed smile can’t conceal an old, jaded soul, one who’d seen it all before she’d even been born. Jean sits down. So many demons. He spends his life permanently ricocheting between unfulfilled impulses and pangs of guilt. Yet right now he can feel a deep-rooted violence welling up inside. He hadn’t noticed it when he spoke to the policewoman minutes earlier. But that image, those words . . . They’d been so clear in his head, and they spelled something different. Something that can’t just be put down to tiredness or stress. Laura’s murder seems to have opened a very deep fault line, bringing him closer to the magma within, the lava of inner confusion. The elaborate crime scene, the potency of the imagery created by the killer . . . It was all speaking directly to his unconscious mind. The waitress brings over his beer and the crackers in their see-through packet. He thanks her and pours the beer himself, tipping the glass to keep the froth to a minimum. Slowly, slowly. That ritual calms him down. Should he start with the beer or the crackers? In a restaurant he’d usually have a French fry before attacking his steak. Never go straight for the main event. He forces himself to drink, leaving the packet unopened.
Vaffanculo! Go fuck yourself, you bastard! Stop giving me shit!
With a sigh Jean leans back in his chair and takes a long gulp, his eyes half-closed. Violence. His boyhood cruelty comes back to him. Toasting ants. The time he beat the hell out of a cat he had trapped in a cemetery with his friend Jérémie simply to let off steam. All reasoning had been shot to pieces. A flash. White light. Jean had never gone as far as taking heroin, but this is how he imagined the high. Kick the shit out of it. Kick it! Kick it!

• SMASH IT BATTER IT
  
• DESTROY THE FUCKING LITTLE CAT
  
• WIPE IT OUT FUCK IT UP
  
• KILL THE FUCKER
  
• LET THE EARTH FINALLY BE RID OF ITS
  
• SHITTY PRESENCE
  

That was the end of obedient little Jean. The kind boy who never caused a stir, who preferred to shut himself in his room, jerking off in shameful silence. He stopped there, dead. Killed in action. A deed, a movement, repeated throughout eternity, for centuries and centuries. Oh, shit!

Then, suddenly, the cat scratched. It startled Jérémie and he let go of it. He stared at Jean. The cat scurried away. “Y-y-y-y-y-you were killing it,” his friend stammered, before getting up and running off. Jean sat down on the mossy gray cement tomb of Pierre Le Bouennec (1903–1971). He looked at his hands, streaked with red, and touched his neck where he could feel droplets of blood. Back to the house. The nurse, his mother, tended to him without asking any questions. She had a sense for these things. Silence was her weapon of choice, along with her all-knowing eyes. Each silence strengthening her grip on Jean. The episode with the cat marked the end of his sadistic phase. From then on he took it out on himself. In his head, for the most part. But he did hurt himself a lot of the time: scrapes, burns, bruises of various sorts. Each time his mother would soothe him without uttering a single word.

He has never told anyone about this. Maybe if he’d met Léna later on? They were only seventeen when they started going out in Saint-Pol-de-Léon. Not the age for talking. More recently he’d let slip the odd snippet in confidence. Aware of the almost palpable pain he was in, she had advised him to start seeing a therapist. She’d been in psychoanalysis herself for four years and felt better for it. They both came from Brittany and shared the same Catholic, commie heritage (they’d met at the local
Jeunesse communiste
center), and she reckoned that the treatment she had been through would not do her policeman comrade any harm.

“You know, Jean, Freud was a Jew. He lived in a Catholic country and expressed hypercritical views toward religion in general—his and ours in particular. And he never believed in communism. He knew human beings too well to subscribe to a utopian ideology. The only thing that will lighten things up is focusing on your relationship with your mother. You’ve only got to read Lacan and watch von Trier’s
Festen
again to understand how vital it is to sort out mommy issues. In Paris, most psychiatrists are Lacanians anyway! No, I assure you, this can only do you good! Sorry, I shouldn’t be talking to you like this. Psychoanalysis—just like therapy—all depends on the patient and his desire to be there. Fuck, I sound so damn serious!? Listen to me! No, forget what I said . . . We were going to have another bottle of beer, weren’t we?”

Jean looks around him. He’s still in the tacky Chinese restaurant. The old guys are packing up their game of mah-jong. The waitress is leaning on the bar, looking at him but not hurrying him. It’s time. He’s finished his Tsingtao without even realizing. He stands up, pays, and grabs his unopened crackers. He feels calmer. Crisis averted. A crack has opened inside him, and he can’t let it close by itself.

13

Ahmed decided against rolling a joint. He stashed the weed that Al gave him in the breast pocket of a clean pajama top. Even if he is wary of his paranoia, he can’t resist the urge to get his brain whirring and make some sense of his encounter with Moktar. He’s not really one for conspiracies or for coincidences. It’s been four years since Moktar last said a word to him. When they cross in the street they avoid each other: no words, but no aggression either. They had been at Maison Blanche at the same time, though not for the same reasons. They weren’t friends. One of their arguments would have boiled over if a nurse hadn’t interrupted. From then on they made a tacit agreement to stay out of each other’s way. Ahmed had become friends with the nurse, Rita, a big red-headed lady. Another redhead! During one of their conversations she had spilled the beans about Moktar’s diagnosis: degenerative paranoid psychosis. Completely incurable. Inevitably his illness had embedded itself into the spirit of the times. It was at Maison Blanche that he began to talk about God. The time spent in the
bled
had sown the seed. A vision of the crime starts to form in Ahmed’s mind. Very vague; imprecise. He has to see the killer’s face again. For that he must sleep. But what about that joint? It was too early. Not inside the apartment. For a second he feels tempted to call up Rachel: “Hi, it’s Ahmed. I was just thinking . . . I’ve got some good shit from Thailand—how about we carry on that chat about Ellroy?” A short laugh. He takes in a deep breath of love and fresh air, then thinks back to Moktar. The psychotic Salafist has got to be part of the picture, but he’s not the killer. He can feel it, somewhere in the corner of his mind. “
Halouf
-eating bastard.” It’s bonkers—why are they so hung up on all that? The pure, the impure . . . He’d never really understood it. Got to be said that Latifa was totally relaxed toward all that. She let him eat and drink anything in the house. He’d never asked his few girlfriends about when their periods were due . . . Come to think of it, he really liked the taste of blood. “The taste of blood?” He repeats the words to himself, his inner voice strangely reminiscent of Dr. Germain’s.
Fuck, you’ve got to be kidding—now I’ve got a shrink in my head!
The thought irritates Ahmed a bit, before he realizes that he’s a bit hungry. He decides to make a special offering to Moktar by tucking into some ham tortellini. Saucepan, water, heat. Quickly resists the sudden urge to plunge his head into the boiling water. Barilla tortellini—eleven minutes. Splash of olive oil, salt, pepper. No parmesan. As he sits down, he spots Mohamed’s letter. He puts it to one side for later. For once he eats slowly, managing not to burn his tongue.