Badfellas (2 page)

“No cereal, no toast, no peanut butter,” said Maggie. “You’ll have to make do with what I’ve got from the local baker – apple
beignets
. I’ll do the shopping this afternoon, so spare me the complaints for now.”

“That’s perfect, Mom,” said Belle.

Warren looked peeved and grabbed a
beignet
.

“Could somebody explain to me why the French, who are famous for their patisserie, have failed to invent the doughnut? It’s not hard, it’s just a
beignet
with a hole in the middle.”

Half-asleep and already exasperated by the thought of the day ahead, Fred asked if the hole added to the flavour.

“They’ve learned about cookies,” said Belle. “I’ve had some good ones.”

“Call those cookies?”

“I’ll make some doughnuts on Sunday, and cookies too,” said Maggie, to keep the peace.

“Do we know where the school is?” asked Fred, trying to take an interest in a daily routine that had hitherto passed him by.

“I’ve given them a map.”

“Go with them.”

“We’ll manage, Mom,” said Warren. “We’ll even go faster without a map. We’ve got a sort of radar in our heads – you find yourself in any street in the world with a satchel on your back, and a little inner voice warns you: ‘Not there, it’s that way’, and you meet more and more shapes with satchels going the same way, until you all plunge into a sort of black hole. It’s a law of physics.”

“If you could only be so motivated in the classroom,” said Maggie.

That was the signal to go. They all kissed each other, said they’d see each other at the end of the afternoon, and the first day began. Each one, for various reasons, held back the thousands of questions on the tips of their tongues, and accepted the situation as if it made some sense.

Maggie and Fred found themselves alone in a suddenly silent kitchen.

“What about your day?” he asked first.

“The usual. I’ll look around the town, see what there is to see, find the shops. I’ll be back about six with the shopping. What about you?”

“Oh, me…”

Behind that “oh, me” she could hear a silent litany, sentences she knew by heart even though they were never actually spoken: oh me, I’ll just spend the day wondering what we’re doing here, and then I’ll pretend to do something, as usual, but what?… That’s the problem.

“Try not to hang around all day in your dressing gown.”

“Because of the neighbours?”

“No, because of your morale.”

“My morale’s fine, Maggie, I’m just a bit disorientated,

I always take longer to adapt than you.”

“What will we say if we run into any neighbours?”

“Don’t know yet, just smile for the time being, we’ve got a couple of days to come up with an idea.”

“Quintiliani says we mustn’t mention Cagnes, we must say we came from Menton; I’ve told the kids.”

“As if that creep had to spell it out.”

To avoid a painful conversation, Maggie went upstairs while Fred made himself feel good by clearing the table. He could now see the garden in daylight through the
window: it had a well-kept lawn apart from a few maple leaves, a green metal bench, a gravel path and a lean-to sheltering an abandoned barbecue. He suddenly remembered his nocturnal visit to the veranda and its strange, rather pleasant atmosphere. He suddenly had to see it again in daylight, before doing anything else. As if there was anything else to do.

It was March, and the weather was mild and bright. Maggie hesitated for a moment over a suitable outfit for her first visit to the town. She was very dark, with a matt complexion and black eyes, and normally wore brown and ochre colours. Today she chose beige jodhpur-style trousers, a grey long-sleeved T-shirt and a cotton cable-stitch sweater. She went downstairs, with a little knapsack over her shoulder, glanced around briefly, looking for her husband, shouted, “See you this evening!” and left the house, unanswered.

Fred went onto the already sunny veranda, where he detected a soft smell of moss and dry wood – a pile of logs left behind by the previous tenants. The blinds over the bay window made stripes of sunshine along the length of the room. Fred pretended these were rays from heaven, and entertained himself by exposing his body to them. The room gave onto the garden, but was protected from the elements and covered pretty well forty square yards. He went over to the dump in the corner and started clearing out all the old stuff cluttering it up and blocking off space and light. He opened the French windows and started throwing all the forgotten possessions of the unknown family out onto the gravel: a television set from another era, some plates and copper pans, grubby telephone directories, a wheel-less bike and a pile of other objects, quite
understandably abandoned. Fred took great pleasure in chucking it all out, muttering “Trash!” and “Junk!” each time he hurled a piece out of his sight. Finally he picked up a small grey-green bakelite case, and was about to hurl it out with the gesture of a discus-thrower. But then he suddenly felt curious about its contents and, placing it on the ping-pong table, prised open the two rusty fasteners and opened the lid. Black metal. Mother-of-pearl keys. European keyboard. Automatic return. The machine had a name too: Brother 900, 1964 model.

Fred now held a typewriter in his hands for the first time in his life. He weighed it as he had done his children when they were born. He turned it around, examining its contours and angles, and its visible machinery, which was both splendidly obsolete and strangely complicated, full of pistons, sprockets and clever ironmongery. With the tips of his fingers he stroked the surface of the keys – r t y u – tried to recognize them just by feel, and then with his whole hand he caressed the metal frame. He held the spool and tried to unwind the ribbon, sniffing it to see if he could smell the ink, which he couldn’t. He hit the n key and then several others, faster and faster until they tangled together. He excitedly untangled them, then placed all his fingers haphazardly on the keys, and there, standing in the pink light of the veranda, with his dressing gown half open and his eyes shut, he felt overcome by a strange and unknown feeling.

In order to retain a semblance of dignity in the playground, surrounded as they were by a thousand curious stares, Belle and Warren chatted to each other
in English, exaggerating their New Jersey accent. Speaking French wasn’t a problem for them; after six years they spoke it a great deal better than their parents, and had even begun to replace English expressions with French turns of phrase. However, in exceptional circumstances, such as those of this particular morning, they found it convenient to revert to a more private way of talking – it was a way of reminding themselves of their own story and where they had come from. They had arrived on the dot of eight at Mme Arnaud’s office; she was the education advisor at the
Lycée
Jules-Vallès, and she asked them to wait in the playground for a moment before introducing each of them to their class teacher. Belle and Warren were starting at the school at the end of the second term, when everybody’s fate had long been decided. The third term would just have to be a springboard for the following year, when she would do her
baccalauréat
, and he would go into
seconde
. Belle had kept up the academic standards of her early years at Montgomery High School in Newark, despite all the upheavals. It had been clear to her, from her earliest youth, that body and soul should enrich one another, exchanging energy and working in harmony. She was curious about everything at school, and concentrated on every subject. No teacher in the world, nor even her parents, could guess at her reason for this – which was to beautify herself. Warren, for his part, who was eight at the time, had learned French in the way you learn a tune, without thinking, without even wanting to. Psychological problems due to his uprooting had meant a year repeated as well as sessions with a child psychiatrist, who was never told the real reason for their leaving America. Nowadays he bore no trace of this, but
he never missed an opportunity to remind his parents that he didn’t deserve this exile. Like all children of whom much is demanded, he had grown up faster than others, and had already established certain principles about life, from which he never departed. There lay within him, beneath the values that he preserved as the precious inheritance of his tribe, an old-world solemnity, in which were mingled both a sense of honour and an instinct for business.

A group of girls from Belle’s class approached her, curious to inspect the new arrival. Mr Mangin, the history and geography teacher, came over to fetch them, and greeted Miss Belle Blake with a touch of ceremony. She left her brother, wishing him luck with a gesture incomprehensible to anyone not born south of Manhattan. Mme Arnaud came to tell Warren that his class didn’t start until nine and that he was to wait in the homework room. He chose instead to nose around the school, casing the joint and establishing the contours of his new prison. He went into the main building of the school, a circular building with spokes, known as “the daisy”, with a hall designed like a beehive, where the older children could hang out away from the homework room, smoke, pick each other up, put up posters and organize meetings – a sort of training ground for adult life. Warren found himself alone there, in front of a hot-drinks dispenser and a large sign advertising the school fête, which would take place on the 21st of June. He wandered down the corridors, opened a few doors, avoided some groups of adults, and ended up in a gymnasium where a basketball team was practising; he watched them for a while, intrigued as ever by the French lack of coordination. One of his
happiest memories was going to a game between the Chicago Bulls and the New York Knicks, and seeing the living legend Michael Jordan flying from one basket to the other. It was enough to make you pine for your homeland for the rest of your life.

A hand on his shoulder put an end to the daydreaming. It wasn’t a monitor or a teacher charged with bringing him back in line, it was a boy, about a head taller than he was, accompanied by two acolytes in loose, too large clothes. Warren was built like his father – small, dark and wiry, with controlled gestures and a natural economy of movement. You could see gravity in the still fixity of his stare. He appeared at first as the contemplative type, the sort whose first reaction is not to react. His own sister had assured him that he would one day become a handsome, greying, experienced-looking man, but that he would have to work hard to achieve that sort of appearance.

“Are you the American?”

As if brushing off a fly, Warren pushed off the hand, which belonged to the one he correctly guessed to be the leader. The two others, apparently his lieutenants, waited cautiously. Warren, despite his youth, recognized that tone of voice, the slightly unsure aggression, the attempt at authority on the off-chance that it might work, the testing of limits. It was the most cautious form of aggression, practised by cowards. Surprised for a moment, the American boy hesitated before answering. In any case, it wasn’t really a question, and whatever it was that these three wanted, they certainly weren’t there just by chance.
Why me?
he wondered. Why had they picked on him, as soon as he had arrived? How had he, in less than half an hour, become the object of this
vague and foolish threat, which was about to become more concrete, encouraged by his silence? He knew the answer, with a knowledge that was beyond his years.

“What do you want from me?”

“You’re American. You must be rich.”

“Cut the bullshit and tell me how your business works.”

“What d’your parents do?”

“None of your fucking business. What’s your little racket? Extortion? Piece work or contract work? How many of you – three, six, twenty? What do you reinvest in?”

“?…”

“Nil organization. Thought so.”

None of the three could understand a word of what he had said, nor where this confidence came from. The leader felt somehow insulted. He looked around, pulled Warren to the end of an empty corridor leading to the refectory and pushed him so hard that he fell onto a low wall.

“Don’t fuck with me, new boy.”

Then all three got together to shut him up, with knees in his ribs and wild punches in the general direction of his face. Finally one of them sat on his chest, went through his pockets and found a ten-euro note. They then demanded from a red and breathless Warren the same sum the next day as an entrance fee to the
Lycée
Jules-Vallès. Holding back tears, he promised not to forget.

Warren never forgot.