Tram 83 (12 page)

“Perhaps she belongs to a wealthy family,” he told himself.

“Come along, let's go to my place, I'll give you a good massage,” the girl said. They took his beige limousine.

They arrived at the girl's place, a two-storey house, with sentries, bodyguards, lampposts, and German shepherds. They made love until five in the morning. They fell asleep entwined. When he awoke, the girl was gone and he found himself bare naked on a crummy bed in a derelict hovel close to the Cabu Bridge. He dressed quickly, jumped into his limousine, third gear. He arrived at the Tram. Some people outside, girls, girls, girls. He entered the
Tram, blurted out his tale.

“The girl's name?” they asked him.

“Georgette Luise de Sonfina, she wore a long periwinkle blue dress and gave off a scent of jasmine.”

The answer they gave froze him to the spot. The baby-chick in question was the daughter of a tourist who'd lived in the 19th century. She had died some eighty years ago, of a cerebral hemorrhage. She had even been buried in the clothes the publisher described, and the same jasmine perfume.

Malingeau attempted to argue but the Negus stuck to his guns.

“You publish that guy, I'll publish your nudity.”

Not knowing how to proceed, he sat his fat ass down, and lit a cigarette. Requiem continued playing accordion with the young lady's massive-melon-breasts as if nothing had happened.

17.

THE COLLECTOR OF NUDES
.

Requiem possessed nude photographs of some two hundred and fifty tourists. They were completely at his feet. They bought him drinks, paid money into his account each month, revered him almost. Irked by this perpetual blackmail, one tourist pressed charges for threatening behavior and defamation. Overnight, Requiem published the pictures of the tourist in his birthday suit in the gossip rags of the City-State. Cherry on the cake, he persuaded the girl to accuse the tourist of rape. The poor tourist pleaded mutual consent, a complete waste of time. Age is a malleable thing in a country whose citizens have been without ID cards since at least the time of Noah, the prophet Ezekiel, and sister Abigail. The young woman was already an adult at the time of the incident. But there was money at stake. Who doesn't like money? The court, which was corrupt to the core, had found a cash cow. The tourist was ruined, threatened with prison, and made to pay a fine. His popularity ever waning, the dissident General sent the tourist back to his own country, hoping to win
the favor of his people. The for-profit tourists protested for several weeks. They were powerless and incapable of rendering the Negus harmless. They could not eliminate him physically. That might have provoked uncontrollable riots and looting, and they would be requested to pack up and leave or else flee like in the days following independence. The worst profanation a for-profit tourist could allow himself was to touch a single hair on Requiem's head.

The Negus's grand dream was to obtain pictures of the dissident General.

18.

MEETING AND TRADING OF ARMS TO SHOW THE MERCENARIES, DESPERADOS, AND THEIR DISSIDENT GENERAL THAT THE WORLD IS A WALTZ
.

Lucien arrived at 63 Prime Ministry Street around two in the morning.

“Do you have the time? Because I'm smitten. I offer you my breasts. Change me. Make me the most beautiful woman!”

“Drinking beer isn't drinking. It's like drinking water.”

“Make love to me hard.”

“Doggy-style, spoon, or missionary? I can even do cowgirl, crab, or octopus, that's proof I'm acquainted with the facts of life.”

Requiem was waiting for him, accompanied by eight men, all with evocative names: Dragon, Mortal Combat, Free Kick, Dysentery, Invincible Measles, and so on.
RULE NUMBER
27: you don't head out to settle your business as if you were going to the beach. “Be imposing,” he stated impatiently. Lucien guessed they were diggers, going by the picks and shovels. After greeting each other, they walked, without a word, down the street to the warehouses that had
been burned out and left derelict following the looting of 1992, then restored, then set on fire during the second half of a war of liberation, then taken over by the dissident rebels, who stayed there with their families and the hundreds of domestic animals they kept.

The main entrance gave some idea of the nature of the place. Goats. Roosters. Turkeys. Doughnut stalls. Wheelbarrows. Vehicles from another era. Chairs without legs. Single-mama-pre-baby-chicks who laugh right in your face and heap abuse at you even if you don't react: “You're all impotent good-for-nothings, scaredy-cats, peasants, pussies, barely men at all. Come here and let's see if you can make us moan!” Single-mamas cooked here and there. They crossed the yard filled with children running in all directions.

Lucien wanted to know a bit more about the mission but,

“Gotta see
Pig Across Paris
. He dominates the film like you've no idea.”

Requiem suddenly began a conversation about Jean Gabin. He had his own peculiar way of dodging awkward questions through cinema and his weakness for gypsy music. Three in the morning … They entered the third warehouse on the left, a kind of utter mess revised and tropicalized.

Great minds think alike. A well-built man, in camouflage fatigues, standing and cleaning a submachine gun, welcomed them with open arms. Requiem hurried through the introductions. 3:10
A.M
. They took their places directly on the jerrycans. The man called out to a young lady, who brought bottles and a succession of joints. Requiem summed up the situation: “Impossible to enter the Polygon lately without being armed. This past month we got shot at by Death-Death's gang. They opened fire on three
of my men while we were taking the merchandise for washing, and vamoosed with it. Last week the desperados and the mine police laid into us.”

“What do you need?”

He continued swabbing the gun without even looking at his visitors. The Negus took out a scrap of paper and slipped it into his hand.

“Anything that will allow us to fight our way through the rock.”

The soldier got up, returned with Kalashnikovs, bayonets, explosives, and uniforms.

“It's the same gear as last time, please return it to me within two days.”

They settled up. Requiem took a few notes out of his haversack. 3:50
A.M
.

“The deities quarrel over the heavens and us the earth. They can't prevent us feasting on our own diamonds,” he moaned.

His gun handling was flawless. Which is normal for someone who'd served in Sudan, Angola, Korea, the former Zaire, Israel, and even Rwanda. Like most young students of the time, he had enlisted supposedly to counter the advances of the second wave of the third war of liberation. Many flocked to join the army with the aim of changing the world, particularly since they enjoyed fantastic pay, as well as training abroad.

Once outside, they divvied up the artillery. Lucien dithered. They made him pull on a uniform.

“We must recover our sacks.”

The dissident General ruled supreme over the City-State. He owned outright twenty artisanal-diamond purchase and export
houses and was a shareholder in nearly all the firms run by the tourists. He sold off the mining concessions, or sometimes even gave them as gifts to whomever he liked. In his megalomania, he closed and opened Hope Mine as he saw fit, even though the whole of the City-State scrounged a living off this mine. At each closure, an indescribable crisis struck the country for the enjoyment of a minority of tourists authorized to excavate at any time. But adventurers and traders pissed all over the lunatic dissident General's decree-laws concerning the closure of Hope Mine. At night they infiltrated the facilities, which were guarded by mercenaries, the chief's personal militia, and other security outfits. Clashes ensued, lasting for hours, accompanied by corpses. The desperados colluded with the mercenaries, supplying them with information and straight-out attacking the diggers, from whom they confiscated the merchandise. The heavily armed diggers, dubbed suicidals for their determination, didn't let themselves be intimidated in any way. They handled their Kalashnikovs wonderfully. Whether diggers or dissident rebels or for-profit tourists or students, the common denominator was the gold rush that began at the station whose metal structure …

Lucien, Requiem, and his friends climbed into a jalopy, destination: Hope Mine. Requiem, who was snorting cocaine after cocaine, soliloquized: “Objective 1: we recover our sacks. Objective 2: beat the crap out of any imbecile blocking our way. Objective 3: vanish into thin air. Objective 4: night of debauchery at Tram 83.” Stoned out of their heads on cannabis, Requiem's crew attempted to outdo each other through the bragging they unfurled, from the single-mamas with sausage-thighs they'd scarfed during burglaries,
to the miner-guards slaughtered in cold blood, not forgetting the many cathouses, which they evoked with a nostalgic air.

In his notebook, Lucien wrote: “The mouths are infected with a thousand thoughts of cannibalism modeled on the Second Republic. What will they munch on when the frangipanis yield guava and the eucalyptuses earthworms?”

Hope Mine, situated not far from the town center, passed for a veritable Tower of Babel. It was the main bone of contention between the various protagonists, who fought over it until the last drop of sweat. The numerous security firms didn't live together in perfect harmony. They functioned according to mood, the tourists, and the interests on that day's agenda. They were hard to manipulate. They betrayed each other, battled each other, hit it off with each other, doggedly harried the suicidals, plotted on behalf of the dissident General, and gathered the scraps from the tourists of British descent.

When they were a few minutes from the Polygon, Dragon and Mortal Combat went scouting ahead. They weren't long in returning.

“The way is clear.”

Requiem cocked his gun:

“Shoot at anything that moves!”

Hope Mine was the oldest of all the mines in the City-State, and it drew the most prospectors. A high wall studded with barbed wire ran around it, enclosing an area twenty-one miles by twenty-five. It contained warehouses, prefabricated sheds, old locomotives, boxcars, and jalopies from the Second Republic. It was renowned for its subterranean galleries packed with all kinds of
minerals. To the northwest of this site with its Martian soil lay the famous Polygon: mounds of stones and craters potentially rich in iron, cobalt, zinc, and cassiterite. The gossip drifting around Tram 83, the Singapore bar-restaurant, and even the Face-to-Face brothel run by Aunty, known as Body-to-Body Granny to her friends, highlighted the fact that even in the farthest lands, beyond Muanda and even Beach Ngobila, Brazzaville, and Gibraltar, there were to be found men who studied Hope Mine and knew it by heart. One must be wary of these unsubstantiated rumors reeled off between a pair of breasts, a salsa variant, and a vodka poured by a busgirl peeved at a baby-chick pinching from right under her nose a client upon whom rested her every hope.

Once inside, Requiem scattered his men to go reconnoiter. The darkness and a constant fear of receiving a walloping made the procedure difficult to follow. They combed a few buildings, smashing them open with the butts of their guns. Not much to speak of, just some old clothes left by fugitives, and garbage bags half full of cow dung. They continued their search.

“Low content,” remarked Requiem, who was already losing his temper.

Lucien, holding a gun for the first time, was at his wits' end, as he begged Mortal Combat and Invincible Measles to convince Requiem to hightail it. But the Negus persisted in checking out the premises.

“Perhaps they've already removed my merchandise. If we trace an imaginary line, maybe we'll run into another group all loaded up, and then we'll teach them to comply without being asked twice.”

He lit a cigarette rolled from cassava leaves.

They went down into the second crater in the center of the Polygon, dug away, Zairian style, extracted two sacks of gravel to wash close by, exited left from the hole, and ran straight into a horde of desperados heavily armed with machetes. Greetings peppered with irony, furtive glances, they faced each other down, before deciding it wasn't worth laying into each other for sacks with no obvious content.

In the end, after being chivvied by Lucien and his friends into turning back, Requiem declared that it was amateurish to go carting their weapons around, and suggested burying them and returning there that very evening, all fired up to loot the whole place.

“Let's head back to the Tram.”

They ended their night of transgression at Tram 83 to the dismally tragic lamentations of the prima donna, the Castafiore, the Railroad Diva.

Tram 83 had a soft spot for the Negus. He stayed the same on all his fronts. He knew what he was doing, that you can't invent the wheel twice, that there's no point fretting, that the rules of the game are clearly defined, and that the main thing is to live off anything that falls into your hands. “The tragedy is already written, we merely preface it.” From the moment this motto began to resonate consciously in his mind, he never held back from following his heart. He was simple and honest even in his mischief.