Arab Jazz (21 page)

They laugh.

24

Since first thing in the morning, Mathilde Vignola has been repeating herself. One single line, over and over, in a sinister nursery-rhyme hum. “The little whore, dead and buried . . . The little whore, dead and buried . . . The little whore, dead and buried . . . The little whore, dead and buried . . .” Tall and willowy, all skin and bones, she might have been beautiful, but her features hardened with her ineffable hatred of the world. Horrified as much as intrigued by his wife’s patent lunacy, Vincenzo wanders from one room to the next in the stone house. As soon as he catches sight of Mathilde he shudders, unable to conceal his panic despite knowing its cause. It is his mortal fear. This gnawing sense of fear is threatening to take hold of him completely, just as madness has gripped his wife. At 7:30 a.m., when he woke up, she was sitting on the right-hand side of the bed in her synthetic burgundy nightdress. When he foolishly tried to explain to her that Laura was dead, yes, but not yet buried, Mathilde’s hawklike eyes bored into his own, so much so that he felt as though they were burning the inside of his skull. Then she slowly lowered her face toward him until it was one inch away, and said:

THE—LITTLE—WHORE—

DEAD—AND—BURIED

A ghastly mixture of hatred, garlic, and bile. At that precise moment he realized his whole life had been determined by his fear of this woman. If it wasn’t for her he’d have taken his business studies degree from La Rochelle and would now be a big mover and shaker in the insurance world, maybe chief accountant at MAIF, or even administrative director at Matmut. Instead of that nicely mapped-out career, he has become, without ever really leaving France (not counting his regular stints in Brooklyn), locked in a parallel universe governed by its own laws. It has been a good life in many ways, above all by letting him wield a disproportionate amount of power over the other prisoners of this strange world that Mathilde plunged him into on their second meeting. Contrary to his naive expectations, they had not ended up back at his place (Italian tunes, glass of Asti Spumante, violet satin bedcovers), but in a Kingdom Hall. Since that evening he had risen to the highest echelons, eventually becoming the organization’s number one in the Poitou-Charentes region. Members’ lives were entirely under his control: camping trips, pets, lovemaking . . . No aspect of their existence escaped him. Despite his power, he always succumbed to his wife’s will. The same wife who is now spitting her vile breath and insanity in his face.

It’s 11:30 a.m. Vincenzo Vignola, head of the council of elders, is pacing around in circles, not daring to leave the house, despite knowing that Mathilde, even in her delirium, is monitoring his every move. She’s lying in wait like an animal, ready to pounce at his throat the second he attempts to call an ambulance. Vincenzo knows she’s capable of anything to avoid going back to the hospital. The more he tries to act naturally, the clumsier his gestures become, and the closer his wife gets to incandescence. Yet even the psychotic have their needs. Mathilde stands up, her litany unbroken, heads to the toilet and locks the door behind her. Vincenzo immediately grabs his car keys and cell and leaves without a sound. As soon as he’s on the move in his car he dials the emergency services: a vehicle will be there in ten to twelve minutes. Avenue de La Rochelle, rue du 24 Février, rue de la Gare, avenue Charles de Gaulle, avenue Louis Pasteur, avenue de La Rochelle. Eighteen minutes later, he parks three houses down from his own. The ambulance is there, flashing lights on. Two nurses stand either side of the stretcher onto which Mathilde is strapped. One of them has a scarlet wound streaked across his right cheek. When she sees Vincenzo get out of his car, she erupts in a wild frenzy.

“Devil, the sign of the beast . . . Filth, muck . . . Laura . . . Same blood . . . Damnation . . .”

She’s slobbering, momentarily silent. A cloud slides across the sky and the sun is freed, lighting up her miraculous smile, so pure and loving. That same smile he remembers from the first time he saw her. Soft, mellifluous words follow.

“You are going to die, Vincenzo. You do realize that, don’t you—that you’re going to die? It’s your turn . . . That is how it is to be.”

Another cloud passes overhead, black, eclipsing the brightness and obscuring her face.

“The little whore, dead and buried . . . The little whore, dead and buried . . . The little whore, dead and buried . . . The little whore, dead and buried . . .”

With the paperwork over and done with, Vincenzo is back in the sitting room staring eternity in the face. Mathilde’s words are dancing a saraband around his head. “You are going to die . . . Die . . . You do realize that, don’t you? Do you realize that? Do you?” He’d like to think that her intention had been to embitter his life, to avenge the madness the world had dealt her, to deny him enjoyment of his newly won freedom. He’d like to think that. But a little voice whispers in his ear.
She’s right, Vincenzo, she’s right. She knows . . . Do you see? She knows . . .
Tears start to flow and he sobs, his body shaking. For thirty years he has earned his living skillfully instilling the fear of the end of the world—Armageddon, Apocalypse—into the credulous hearts of his flock. And that dreaded abyss is now swallowing him whole. He’s been hurled into empty, infinite space. Alone and naked amid the nothingness.

A primal, primitive sense of foreboding hooks itself on to the very immediate concerns he already has about the unfolding operation. No word from the people who should have been and gone an hour ago to pick up the consignment. Every thirty seconds Vincenzo checks his watch. Outside the sun is shining with a mocking brightness. His black Sagem vibrates on the table. Private number.

“Yes.”

“Are you in place?”

Vincenzo recognizes the voice as belonging to the man he’s only met once. Bad sign.

“What’s happening? I’m waiting here like a fool.”

“Calm down. Stay put . . . Two hours from now all will be well.”

“Two hours! But I’ve got stuff to do. I can’t sit around waiting! This is not how it was meant to go!”

“But this
is
how it is going. Is that clear? You have no control over any of this. So be good and wait patiently—it’s not hard. Got it?”

“I’ll be here on Saturday. We’ll talk on Saturday.”

“Saturday, eh? Okay, on Saturday we’ll talk.”

The line goes dead. Vincenzo bends backward with a sigh. Now he realizes. His destiny is right here, and he has no other option than to submit to it. That’s all he’s ever been: an instrument, a cog. He knows that he should have followed Mathilde’s crazy but somehow reasonable ambitions. But he chose to bow to another mistress who was even more demanding, even more dangerous. Mathilde can see clearly in her dark state. Of course she knows what’ll happen. As for him, how can he change that which has been written?

He picks up the T.G.V. ticket lying on the table next to the telephone.

• Departure: Niort, 11:37
  
• Arrival: Paris-Montparnasse, 14:00
  

How can he change what has already been written?

25

Ahmed has been waiting his turn at Sam’s for twenty minutes. Flicking through a copy of
Auto hebdo
, he strives to follow the conversation between the barber and Albert, an old Egyptian Jew swamped by an enormous yet immaculate cream suit, who has spent the last thirty years trotting out the same story. As a tailor in Zamalek—a Cairo neighborhood favored by expats and the old post-Ottoman bourgeoisie, who longed for a return to the days of King Farouk—he had succeeded, by adapting his style, in establishing a clientele made up predominantly of officials from Nasser’s government, making elegant clothing to measure that at the same time strictly adhered to the revolutionary code. He turned a blind eye to late payments from his frequently cash-strapped customers, relying instead on Western diplomats to keep the shop afloat. In return for his unreserved discretion—letting anything slip would have constituted a major faux pas in the tailor’s eyes—Albert had hoped he would be rewarded with some kind of immunity should the going get tough. Alas! This was 1967, and the going was not so much tough as nonnegotiable. The only special treatment he received at the outbreak of the Six Day War was a warning that came through a few hours before the imminent expulsion of all “Jewish foreigners.” Now that second word was superfluous, since virtually every Jew in Egypt had European nationality, many of them British or French, dating back to the period of Ottoman rule where non-Muslim minorities were “protected” by Christian powers—France, England, or Russia (fortunately for Albert, the Russians only protected members of the Orthodox faith). So the Jewish tailor had half a day to put his affairs in order before leaving the only country he had ever lived in, never to return. He wasn’t rich—he had served the rich. The meager savings he had scraped together was just enough to allow him to open a small workshop on rue Riquet. He’d barely opened his doors when the prêt-à-porter boom hit him like a truck.

“You know, Sam, the Six Day War . . . I survived it, at the end of the day, and I had no hand in it. I was neither Egyptian nor Israeli. I was French. Never before had I considered myself French, but . . . ah,
maalesh
, when I look at what happened later, I tell myself that I did well to leave that region of madmen. No, my real Six Day War, the one that really laid me out, was against that prêt-à-porter muck. That, old friend, was worse than any tank, any bombardment . . . The worst of all! An unstoppable machine. Imagine a machine taking over your job! Imagine, Sam,
ya sahabi!
Some laser-beam contraption to cut your customers’ hair. Same style for men and women. What would you do if those started springing up all over the place? A kiosk down at the supermarket, between the photo booth and the photocopier, with a range of styles to suit any hairdo: you just choose which one, then scissors, clippers . . . everything done automatically! You just plunk yourself down, even choose what music to listen to: a bit of Dalida, some Maurice El Medioni, Enrico Macias, Lili Boniche, the works . . . What would you do if things came to that?”

“I couldn’t give a damn anymore, Albert,
ya khouya!
I’ll be retiring in a year’s time . . . And Sholem, my son, has been in Brooklyn for a good while now, at Toledano’s yeshiva, you know, our rabbi’s cousin, the one who’s just been declared rebbe by his followers. My Sholem is going to be a rabbi, not a barber. And quite frankly, what more can I ask of God, eh?”

“My goodness, yes . . . Well, as for me, my Six Day War, my anti-prêt-à-porter campaign, brought me to my knees, and I’ve finally decided to call it a day.
La belle France
is generous, you know . . .”

“And so is the Unified Jewish Social Fund. Us hard-working folk picking up the tab for your indolence. But that’s okay, because you come here and repay my donations in part. That’ll be seven fifty.”

Sam whips off all the paraphernalia with a sharp movement and Albert gets to his feet. They settle up and the barber stands on the doorstep to shake the hand of his elegant client.

“Shabbat shalom!”

“Ah yes, that’s right, it is the sabbath today, I almost forgot. Good job you reminded me.”

“Don’t pretend that’s not why you came here. As if I’m not going to find you down at the synagogue later, sucking up to the rabbi and the faithful Jews who are bailing you out, you unbelieving rogue. Typical Egyptian Jews! Us Moroccan Jews are savages in your eyes, but you all, you’re just a bunch of sly old dogs! Go on, off you go, my brother. See you tonight. Enough harping on—now it’s my boy Ahmed’s turn; come on and get your haircut by your old papa Sam.”

The tone is ever-so-slightly false. When the old barber closes the door behind Albert, Ahmed gets up in meditative mode. The name of a book he’s seen kicking about Dr. Germain’s comes back to him suddenly:
L’Imposture perverse
. The perverse deception. The perverse Sam. Sam laying into Laura, or rather watching while some other sick bastard does. The scene comes to Ahmed easily. An empty space—a warehouse, perhaps—the knifeman at work with his back turned, and Laura gagged. Her legs apart but bound together. Eyes wide open. Horror. Not the sort of lightweight nastiness you get in Japanese bondage mangas. No—we’re talking the depths of human depravity. Dante, Pasolini. Sam standing to one side. His face contorted in a state of arousal that is at once extreme and contained. And then the knifeman starts to turn around. Ahmed blinks rapidly to shake off the vision. Not the time or place to come face-to-face with the murderer. He’s seen him from behind, knows that he recognizes him, but he can’t put a name to those broad, sloping shoulders. Will he have the courage to confront him when the moment comes? So close. He’s brought around by a short burst of unidentifiable rap pouring out of a Mercedes coupe with Hauts-de-Seine plates and tinted windows, something about speaking with a Glock in your mouth.

A Glock, a shooter. That’s what he needs. How can he get his hands on one? He can deal with that later. For now, let’s look happy! Play the idiot, the same old oddball. Ahmed has known Sam since he was a child. His mother used to bring him here to get his haircut every other month because it was just next door and because Sam was Moroccan. She’d speak to him in Arabic, which calmed her down. The youngster didn’t understand a word. Ahmed realizes that this was the only place where his mother spoke her native language. With him it was French from day one. What could they have talked about, the Jewish barber and the young, estranged, ex-Maoist daughter of a religious leader? Not the faintest idea . . . He also remembers Sholem, Sam’s son. They’d barely ever spoken despite being in the same class at primary school. Bizarrely enough Sholem was really tight with Haqiqi at the time. Funny to think now that one of them was a Salafist and the other had left for Brooklyn, the mecca for ultra-Orthodox Jews. Despite being removed from the world for so long, it was impossible for anyone who grew up in this neighborhood not to have heard of Schneerson, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, who preached the coming of the Messiah over there on the other side of the Atlantic. Sholem got set up there through the local Hasidic rabbi’s cousin. Ahmed can’t think why, but the Brooklyn connection is arousing his curiosity. A lot. But how can he mention it to Rachel without letting on that he knows about the pork joint? How? He’s going to have to find something on Sam that brings everything together. He’s not normally very talkative, but he decides to make an effort to keep the conversation going in the hope of gleaning some information, a clue, a confirmation. Not so much he blows his cover. Just enough to keep it flowing if necessary.