Arab Jazz (17 page)

As he walks, Ahmed tries to get rid of Abdelhaq’s miserable face. He finds deliverance in Monsieur Paul’s features; the perfect antidote. Since Laura’s death, the old Armenian is the only friendly person he has left in the world. A tenuous link, but a real one. Maybe the Armenian represents the “way of managing” mentioned by Germain? Hadn’t he said something recently about helping him at the bookshop? Something about shifting boxes that he can no longer lift? Why not? In a flash, Ahmed is panicking, shaking. An irrepressible, absurd thought overwhelms him that Monsieur Paul and Dr. Germain are in cahoots and have come up with this plan to coerce him into getting back to work. He pulls himself together quickly and reflects that it really is in his best interests to resume the sessions if he is to avoid stewing in his state of semi-paranoid inertia. He’ll go and see the bookseller, but first he’s got to tell someone. Rachel. Without stopping to think, he dives into a telephone booth, armed with the France Télécom card he’d bought the evening before, and dials.

“Hello . . .”

“I didn’t wake you?”

“No, my colleague took care of that five minutes ago . . . Ahmed . . . To what do I owe the honor of this morning call? Some news? Something come back to you?”

“No, no—it’s nothing to do with the investigation. It’s just . . .”

“Yes?”

“It’s just I decided to go back to work. And I don’t know, I just wanted to tell someone, and the only person who sprung to mind was you. In fact, I wanted to call you last night as I was passing the Boeuf-Couronné—I saw you and your colleague in there—but that wasn’t really a good enough reason. So, there you go, I just wanted to hear your voice, that’s all.”

“So you saw me last night, and you wanted to call me; you wanted to hear the sound of my voice, is that it? Is that not some sort of declaration? I mean, I’m guessing this doesn’t happen to you often, you calling up a woman to tell her this kind of thing?”

“Never. This never happens to me. I’m sorry if I bothered you, but I don’t know, something came over me. I just had to call.”

“Don’t be sorry, Ahmed. It’s always a mistake to be sorry. It doesn’t bother me that you wanted to hear the sound of my voice. It doesn’t bother me at all. It’s just that I’m in the middle of investigating a murder, and you are—hmm—let’s say . . . kind of a key witness in this investigation.”

“Yes, of course. Well, there you have it—I just wanted to tell you that I’m resuming psychoanalysis and, because it’s going to cost me this time around, I’m going to get back to work. At the bookshop; Monsieur Paul’s. I needed to hear myself say it to someone, out loud you know, so it becomes real . . . Does that make sense?”

“Perfect sense. And I think it’s really great, too. The sessions and Monsieur Paul, I mean. Listen, I have to go now, but don’t hesitate to call me again, Okay? About Monsieur Paul or anything else. And don’t forget . . . Laura’s killer—I really do want to catch him. So if anything comes back to you that might speed up the inquiry, if you see or hear anything to do with the case, then I’m all ears. Okay?”

Ahmed is tempted—more than tempted—to mention the incident with Moktar from the night before. Just to keep her on the line for a few more minutes. Just to hear her voice, her breathing a little longer. But no. It’s too dangerous. Lending too much significance to Moktar’s porcine insults would risk her suspecting that he knows about the pork joint in Laura’s apartment. Only the police and the killer know about that.

“Me too, I want to catch him. I’ll do anything. As soon as I hear something I’ll let you know—that’s a promise! Have a good day, Lieutenant Kupferstein.”

“And you too, Monsieur Taroudant.”

On his way to the bookshop, Ahmed replays the conversation on repeat. Especially the end. “Have a good day, Lieutenant Kupferstein.” “And you too, Monsieur Taroudant.” He loves it. He loves it, quite literally. And he really wants to be able to say something that matters next time. Something that will help the investigation progress without putting himself in danger. Something that will lead to a meeting in person.

19

Chaim Potok High School. Fourteen months earlier.

At least once a week, Susan comes to see Dov in the exquisitely ’60s chemistry lab that he is restoring in the Jewish high school in Queens. Rabbi Toledano found him the job as a stopgap. Over the past six months, Susan has learned a lot about Dov, filling the gaps in his life story with every meeting. Starting off with his stint in prison for synthesizing MDMA in the lab at Harvard and distributing it for free to his student friends, who were all the more indiscreet thanks to the fact that the trainee chemist’s drug proved to be ultra-powerful. Inside, Dov soon discovered that being a geeky, rather pudgy Jewish Rastafarian was a serious handicap with the gang leaders, especially the black or Latino ones, or those from Italian families who were not yet totally overwhelmed by the other ethnic groups. Scrapes, near-miss brawls, threats. The plan was to make him suffer a long series of humiliations, more than likely starting off with a gang rape in the showers the Thursday after his arrival. There are no secrets in prison: Albert Bénamou, a car thief originally from Toronto, got wind of the trouble in store for the new detainee, a young, defenseless Jewish student. Albert was not fainthearted and knew how to earn respect. Striking a deal with the Dominican gang who had claimed Dov, he “bought him back” off them. Before they met, Dov had been completely clueless about the Sephardim. He thought that, like his grandparents, all Jews came from Poland, Lithuania, or Belarus at least. It had never crossed his mind that there might be Moroccan Jews. Albert demanded nothing in exchange for his protection. Other than—and this was more a favor—going with him to the Talmud Torah classes given every other Sunday in the prison library by Rabbi Toledano. This is how he did his
teshuvah
—more out of boredom than conviction. Out of spite, too, since his family had become increasingly distant. Sure, he had let them down. Sure, Wichita was thousands of miles from his county jail in Boston. But there was a striking contrast between Rabbi Toledano’s warm humanity and kindness, and the coldness of the letters that accompanied the packages from his parents. They only made a grand total of one visit in all his eighteen months inside. When he got out, Dov cut ties with his past, his family, and handed himself over entirely to the rabbi, who found him a place to live in Crown Heights, signed him up to his yeshiva, turning a blind eye to his dreads and his green, yellow-and-red T-shirts on the condition that he covered it all up with a white shirt and a black hat, and that he let his tzitzits hang loose.

In the six months she’s been visiting Dov, Susan has learned how to roll joints. This is precisely what she’s doing now while he’s fixing a Bunsen burner. She admires her work with an air of satisfaction, lights it, takes a long toke, holds the smoke in her lungs, then breathes out. Another drag before offering the cone to Dov. Her voice changes tone slightly, her eyes shining.

“I’ve got a weird question for you: why have you never tried anything with me?”

Dov takes a toke and waits for a moment before responding.

“What about you?”

“Me? Oh, that’s easy! I only sleep with men I don’t like. That way I can ditch them as soon as I’ve had enough. Forget about them. With you, I’m not sure . . . First off I didn’t find you that physically attractive, but then I think I did like you right away. I wanted you to be in my life, so that it wasn’t just James . . .”

Susan feels like a little girl.

“Your turn now!” she says in a shrill voice, blushing.

“Initially I wondered why you were interested in me, and I thought that if it was something sexual, then you’d have found a way to get that across, since you were the one calling the shots. Afterward I didn’t give it much more thought—the moment had gone. And then we started smoking together, and I really needed that.”

“You don’t have a girlfriend then? Have you ever had a girlfriend?”

“You want to know if I’m a virgin, right? Or a fag? I’ve never had a girlfriend, and I’ve never been with a guy either. It’s never been a big deal to me. Not as much as dope, chemistry, and Bob Marley . . . I can’t really explain it.”

“I get it, I totally get it. I didn’t want to . . . It’s just, I’m not sure, I needed to know . . . Not even sure why . . .”

“The rabbi’s finding me a wife.”

“A wife?”

“Yeah, a French girl. The daughter of a follower of his cousin, who’s a rabbi in Paris. A pretty girl . . . Can you imagine? Me, Dov from Wichita, Kansas, with a nice Jewish girl from Paris!”

“A Parisian—how chic! But are you going to get married without getting to know each other?”

“Yeah, that’s how they do it. And I’m one of them now. You know, Rabbi Toledano . . . Uh, the rebbe, I should say. I’m still not used to it. It’s only been three months since he declared himself Rebbe Toledano. So, the rebbe doesn’t have a son, and all his daughters are already married, so this is his way of keeping me close to him.”

“Keeping you close to him . . . He must be extremely fond of you . . .”

“He’s a mystic. He believes in chance encounters and signs. From the moment he saw me, he said there was something special between us. That God was present. And then there was this dream—it’s extraordinary, you know . . . It was two days before we met at the pizzeria. That’s another reason I went with you to Central Park.”

“A dream? You’ve never mentioned it before.”

“No, but now is the time, because it’s just come true. The first image was a girl. I didn’t get a close look at her, but when you sat down in front of me two days later, I felt as though I recognized you, that you were that girl. In the dream, you were saying . . . or rather she was saying something like ‘Listen’, or ‘Write’, or ‘Look’ . . . Something like that. She went over to a blackboard, took a piece of chalk and drew a chemical formula, then turned back to me going
‘Shhh’,
like this, and then left. The crazy thing is that I remembered the formula and wrote it down as soon as I woke up. Do you want me to show you?”

“Yeah, go on!”

Dov goes back to the board and draws some lines, letters and numbers. Susan, intrigued, sees something take shape in front of her. She doesn’t understand it in the slightest, but she knows that it symbolizes her very future.

“There you go. That’s what came to me in my dream. At the time, I got the impression that I knew the formula . . . A second later it came to me: it’s almost identical to psilocybin, but the opposite, like a mirror image, right? Hold on, I’ll draw it for you and you can see.”

He scribbles another diagram super-fast, explaining as he goes to a fascinated and increasingly puzzled Susan.

That’s psilocybin. Precisely the same formula, but the three bonds with the N and the two CH
₃
bits on the end are stuck to the other side; on the hexagon, if you like, rather than the pentagon.

“Excuse me, Dov, this is all great—really great—but if I’m going to follow I need you to fill me in on what the hell this psilocybin is.”

“It’s the main active compound in ’shrooms . . . Never heard of ’shrooms? Hallucinogenic mushrooms. A wicked natural drug, a bit like peyote; you must have heard of peyote! Shamans, Castaneda?”

“Err, no, not really. Heard a bit about shamans when we were living with the Inuit . . . Pure evil in my father’s eyes, something to shun and destroy at all costs.”

“With the Inuit? What were you doing over there?”

“One year after my mother’s death, the Jehovah’s Witnesses sent my father to Greenland as a missionary. We were toddlers at that stage and we went with him. Nancy, our Inuit nanny, brought us up until the age of four. My earliest memories date back to Godthåb, the capital, where we lived. Our father was always away. Of course Nancy was a Jehovah’s Witness, but Dad didn’t trust her. It’s weird, but the two things I remember best are her gentleness, her lullabies to help us fall asleep, and his vehemence when he spoke of the Inuit. He really hated them . . . Each time he came back, we were subjected to long, rambling discourses where he’d explain why we had to be careful around them. Above all, he spoke about his enemies, the shamans, who from his point of view were demons under the influence of drugs. At the time, we didn’t understand a thing, but it left its mark on our minds. Anyway, back to you . . . Finish telling me about these ’shrooms: I prefer your story to mine. It makes me sad every time I think back to it.”