Ahmed wakes up at 5:25 a.m. and slips into his tracksuit and sneakers before stuffing the plastic bag containing the djellaba stained with Laura’s blood into his Eastpak knapsack, along with a large box of matches, a pair of extra-thin cleaning gloves, a bottle of methylated spirits that had been sitting under the sink for years, an old cloth, a large bottle of Evian, and the bar of Ivoria chocolate. Ahmed knows the police won’t carry out a search this morning. It’s too early for them to have had a list of suspects approved by the juge d’instruction—the magistrate assigned to investigate the case. He had no interest, however, in not letting them into his apartment to interrogate him and to look at Laura’s balcony from a different angle. He doesn’t want to take the risk of keeping the bloodstain at his place—no doubt this would mean the start of a very long series of questions. He keeps hold of the key: the concierge knows that he goes up to water Laura’s plants when she’s away. This in itself is enough to make him a witness of considerable interest, maybe even a suspect, in a crime where there is no sign of forced entry.
Ahmed gave up jogging three years ago. Running again is painful for his rusty body. But it makes him happy too. He can feel his muscles, his bones, the brisk morning air. Instinctively he heads toward canal Saint-Denis. He prefers this route—much trashier than canal de l’Ourcq with its cycle lanes, trees, and Chinese guys doing tai chi at sixteen frames per second. The embankment overlooking the quai de la Gironde is strewn with bottles of super-strength beer, torn-up Rizla packs, soiled tissues, and used condoms, all awash in the acidic stench of urine. A few yards above this wasteland, a flight of steps leads up to the périphérique beltway, flowing freely at this time of the morning. Not a soul in sight. He takes shelter behind some undergrowth, puts on the gloves and pulls the djellaba and methylated spirits out of the bag. He uses the cloth to wipe down the bottle meticulously before tossing it among the other detritus. He strikes a match. Whoosh! The rush of heat hits him square on, knocking him back. When the flame is at its highest, he scrunches the plastic bag into a ball and throws it onto the fire with the matches, chucking on the cloth and the gloves as a finishing touch. The frrr of the burning sulfur and the fshhh of the melting plastic provoke a boyish glee in him. It’s pure “Comic Strip” by Gainsbourg—right down to the smell. With his right hand wrapped up in his tracksuit top he grabs a rusty piece of metal and uses it to scatter the embers around the makeshift grate, still warm with charred, melancholy remains that make his heart sink. That strange, forgotten feeling returns: he is alive; he can feel again. A heart, a soul, a body. Quick—run.
He steps out of the elevator and Jean and Rachel are there, virtually see-through after their sleepless night, taking turns ringing his doorbell. Short jabs for her; longer bursts for him. It’s 6:45 a.m. Ahmed managed to buy a baguette and some croissants from a nearby boulangerie owned by a devout Tunisian who opens his doors after the Fajr prayer. The quintessential morning jogger. Ahmed is all set to play the part of the person who has seen nothing, heard nothing.
“Morning—that’s me you’re buzzing. What can I do for you?”
Rachel, her red hair ablaze after a night of beer, cigarettes, and memories, takes out her ID and introduces herself.
“Police. Lieutenant Kupferstein.”
She points to her sidekick—tall, dark hair, haggard face.
“Lieutenant Hamelot.”
Then silence. She lets the victim’s neighbor register their presence. He doesn’t move an inch—waiting, leaning against the wall next to the light switch. When the timer runs out he presses it again. Before, in another life, Ahmed had never been particularly chatty, but he did appreciate the company of others; he liked listening, observing. He had developed a certain talent for predicting people’s characters, and sometimes their thoughts. His gaze flicks between the two police officers as he attempts to read his uncertain future in the lines of their faces. The woman is beautiful. Thirty-five at a guess. Five years older than him. Intelligent, different: her understanding of the world comes from another, more ancient time. She has sided with life, wholeheartedly. The man is the same age as her. As inward-looking as she is outward. Something is gnawing away at him, but he’s refusing to find out what. Amazingly that doesn’t make him bad. He is floating, remote.
Ahmed senses that they are clean and that they are not going to hurt him. He loosens up, breathes in, lowers his guard, and calmly lets himself be observed by Lieutenant Kupferstein.
Thanks to the concierge, Rachel knows that Ahmed has a copy of the keys. At this stage in the inquiry, that makes him the only potential suspect. But she is suspicious of the obvious. She takes her time to examine every detail of the face staring back at her: the sides of the nose slightly flattened; well-pronounced ears poking out from underneath an afro; an extremely prominent Adam’s apple; full lips. His gaze is intense and kind, tainted by a deep-rooted sadness. An open window which she can see into immediately. It’s not him.
That won’t stop her from playing the game and saving face whenever necessary. But in the silence of the landing, with the light switching itself off continuously, there’s no need to pretend. Just to stay quiet. For a few seconds. To let eternity play out, as forever is in front of her.
Jean is like a psychoanalyst midsession. He detects the silent link generated between Rachel and Ahmed and intuitively takes a back seat. His natural place. Hamelot likes watching, likes to take his time, to let others do the talking. “You know what you are? An observer of life!” Léna had said to him one day. He had never really understood why that was such a problem. Having given it much thought over the years, he had come to the conclusion that most women just didn’t like it. Rachel didn’t give a shit. Not when it came to work, at least. It made a change from the endless good cop-bad cop charade. With Kupferstein and Hamelot it was more of a present-absent thing. Rachel taking the lead; Jean detached, under cover. But right now something else is happening, prevailing.
The whole of the rest of the inquiry plays out in this instant. A minute and a half that feels like several hours for three people brought together on this nondescript landing by an unspeakable murder.
Yet the silence must stop. So Rachel speaks.
“We are investigating a murder. Your neighbor upstairs.”
It’s an emphatic full stop—nothing left hanging. Ahmed must react immediately. He decides to take the easy option: no playing, no pretending . . . He must genuinely realize that Laura has been murdered. That’s not far from the truth anyway. He’s seen the body, but has chosen to hold back the emotion that threatens to overwhelm him. He can experience the death of his neighbor in real time, in front of Kupferstein and Hamelot. A silence that at first fails to comprehend, then refuses to comprehend. Four seconds.
“What do you mean ‘a murder, your neighbor upstairs’?”
“Can we talk about this inside? The corridor doesn’t seem the ideal spot.”
It’s Ahmed’s turn to fix his brown eyes on hers, which are blue-green. Without expecting it, he is thrown fifteen years into the past. The girls’ toilets at the lycée. Esther’s big eyes. Esther—the purest, most short-lived love of his life—on the day of the first of their seven kisses. Kupferstein holds his gaze, of course. A blue-green ocean in which he tries not to lose himself, pulling himself free as delicately as he can.
He must hold back from tasting the salt left on his skin from Rachel’s eyes until later. He peels himself off the wall, takes two steps toward the door and gets his key out.
“May I?”
Jean steps aside. Ahmed opens up and goes in, followed by the others. His manner is welcoming.
“Sorry about the mess.”
The two police officers are so bowled over by the strange spectacle that greets them that they don’t even bother to reply. It’s not so much a mess as an overbearing feeling of emptiness and fullness.
Emptiness. The bare minimum of furniture: a table consisting of a sheet of MDF held up by two white wooden trestles; a futon lying on the gray linoleum floor with a beige comforter on top (nine dollars and ninety-nine cents—Jean remembers almost buying the same cover that hellish afternoon at Ikea); a red Chinese wheeled suitcase, which Rachel can imagine containing the few essential items that make up Ahmed’s wardrobe, doubling as a bedside table, with three books and a small green metal lamp on it. That’s it.
Fullness. The walls of the studio apartment have completely disappeared behind hundreds and hundreds of books piled up in stacks. At a glance, they’re four layers deep. Only detective novels. Pocket editions. The two officers are speechless for a moment, then Rachel gets things moving.
“Have you read them all?”
“Yes.”
What more is there to say? They take a seat on some orange folding chairs, noticing a white ceramic lamp with a cream light shade, three CDs (Fela Kuti, Gainsbourg, Boris Vian), a national ID card, and a cherry Yoplait jar—empty—its teaspoon stuck to the inside. Ahmed sits next to Jean, opposite Rachel. She breaks the silence after a ten-second wait.
“Did you know Laura Vignola?”
“Did I know her?”
“Yes, perhaps I should have started with that: she’s been murdered.”
Ahmed repeats the word very softly, closing his eyes. Like an echo.
“Murdered . . .”
He disappears into the distance, imagining the life he might have led with Laura. Love, a child, a second child, sleepless nights, baby bottles, fading desire. Washing machine, car, vacations at a rented cottage in the countryside. After the separation, they continue to treat each other with respect. Why not, after all? A life that will not be led.
Rachel realizes that Ahmed is zoning out. She turns away and drifts off herself, allowing long-forgotten feelings to come back to her.
She is back at her father’s workshop. She is nine years old, and this world apart—familiar, yet strange—has always fascinated her. Full of swirling smells, sounds, and textures that do not exist anywhere else. Freshly tanned leather. Its softness as she holds it to her cheek. Its strength. The muffled echoes of generations of ancestors from Vilnius, with her father the last one born there, the last to inherit that age-old knowledge and understanding before leaving for France. Gestures and attitudes that belonged to him alone and which she knew came from somewhere else, somewhere she would never know. She spent hours there, watching in silence, doing her homework, going over her lessons. Her father and his workshop: the only person and the only place where she could feel at peace, until she decided to cast off their protection to face the world. As she slips out of this bittersweet reverie, she glances over at Jean, who is even more absent than usual, immersed in the world of noir fiction, head tilted to one side to read the book titles. The Breton has never seen such a collection. Nights spent reading and rereading under the sheets by the light of his orange flashlight come flooding back to him, first Chase, then Horace McCoy, Chandler and Hammett, his favorite. As could be expected for the son of a Communist from Saint-Pol-de-Léon. Whiskey and class warfare—that is his cultural stock.
The oppressive atmosphere that assailed them upon entering the studio apartment has lifted. Ahmed’s apartment is like a sort of reality-free zone where Kupferstein and Hamelot are able to navigate their own inner worlds unfettered. And they reach an agreement. They tacitly communicate what they both know—this is not our guy. Strangely they feel as though they’re carrying out this investigation as a threesome, rather than a twosome. An Ashkenazi Jew, a spaced-out Breton, and a loony Arab. The dream team of the nineteenth arrondissement! Now it’s time to play cops and robbers.
Rachel touches down gently and Ahmed seems to come around too.
“Monsieur Taroudant, did you know Laura Vignola?”
“Yes and no. I used to go up and water her flowers when she was away.”
Rachel fires a look over at Jean to make sure he doesn’t say anything inappropriate. But he’s still way off in Finistère. She continues.
“So you owned a set of her keys?”
Ahmed looks at her again, trying to erase the memory of Esther as he gazes at the freckles dotted across her cheekbones. She waits patiently, examining his noble face once more—very brown, almost black, more Sudanese than Moroccan—which seems stretched by life’s hardships, as though he has seen too much.
“Yes, she left a spare set with me.”
Jean takes over seamlessly.
“And what were you doing last night?”
“Nothing much. I read then I went to bed.”
“What were you reading?”
Rachel’s question takes them all by surprise, herself included.
“My Dark Places by James Ellroy. Know it?”
She can’t help but smile slightly.
“Yes, I’ve read it. It’s a strange book, one that conceals as much as it reveals. A book to calm the waters after the storm of White Jazz.”
Rachel’s words unsettle Ahmed. He looks at her, his head cocked to one side, and then smiles shyly.
“I’ve never met a woman who likes Ellroy . . .”
“Well, I am a policewoman . . .”
“Yeah, a policewoman . . . true. Almost forgot. Suppose the police are just like everyone else, aren’t they? They tell each other stories. To convince themselves the world isn’t as bad as all that . . . Do you know what White Jazz means?”
“Well, yes.”
“There’s the obvious translation. But according to Ellroy, the meaning is more like ‘a twisted plan hatched by white guys’.”
“Monsieur Taroudant, perhaps we’ll have the pleasure of continuing this literary discussion some other time. As it happens, my colleague and I are here to ask you some questions.”
Rachel takes out her Oxford spiral notebook and her vintage orange pen complete with black cap. Ahmed pulls himself together and carries on the game of “what if.” What if this is a real interrogation? What if it’s already too late for pretending? He’s talking like one of the countless characters from one of the countless novels decorating his walls.
Starting with . . . “Is there anyone who can verify your whereabouts and provide an alibi?”
Precisely.
“No, no one.”
“We rang your buzzer at around 9:45 p.m. Why didn’t you answer?”
Ahmed holds up the small yellow box sitting on the hessian carpet next to the tired-looking futon.
“I sleep with ear plugs in.”
Jean looks at Rachel as if to say “let’s leave it for now”, and turns to Ahmed.
“Can we see the balcony?”
“I’ll open the blinds for you.”
A ’70s-style metal shutter; the slats painted white. Ahmed turns the handle. Bit by bit the balcony appears before the police officers’ eyes. Nothing but a flower pot with a white lily in it. Jean opens the glass door, steps outside, looks up, and turns back toward the dark-skinned Arab. His voice takes on a more insistent tone, his eyes narrowing.
“And did you go onto the balcony yesterday afternoon?”
A five-second silence in which Ahmed appears to be trying to piece together the events of the day before bit by bit.
“To be honest, I can’t really remember . . . I spent the day lying on the futon, reading, drinking green tea, coffee, eating crackers; so I must have gotten up and gone to the kitchen, plus a few trips to the toilet. I usually wake up early and take the opportunity to water my lily. It’s the best time for it because the soil is still cool. Yesterday morning . . . Yeah, I went out on the balcony at about 6:30. After that, I don’t know. As soon as I start reading I tend to lose track of what’s going on around me. Often it’s not till the end of the day, when I think about making dinner, that I become aware of certain things that have happened throughout the day in my semiconscious state.”
“Do you have a job, Monsieur Taroudant?”
“I’m on sick leave.”
“Since when?”
“Five years. I’ve been on disability benefits three and a half.”
“Do you mind me asking why you’re on disability benefits?”
“Depression.”
“Is that considered a disability?”
No response.
“Okay. . . . What was your job before?”
“Night watchman at a furniture warehouse.”
The two police officers exchange a knowing look. Rachel, with her big eyes, keeps things moving.
“Great, thanks for your cooperation. I’ve no doubt we’ll be paying you another visit. In the meantime, get in touch whenever.”
Ahmed wonders if he’s dreaming, but for a brief moment he detects in her eyes an invitation to call, whether he has reason to or not. She scribbles their contact details on a sheet of paper that she’s ripped out of her notebook and hands it to him. He slips it into his wallet.
“By the way, you’re not planning on traveling any time soon, are you?”
“I never leave the nineteenth arrondissement.”
“Perfect, well until further notice, stick to that.”
“Fear not.”
The officers bid him farewell with a nod and leave. Ahmed closes the door behind them. It’s all good—all part of the script. All he needs to do now is listen to a bit of jazz to channel the spirits of Pinkerton past. If he gets out of this he’ll write a book—that’s a promise. He’ll call it Arab Jazz. Ha! Shit, what’s going on—even cracking gags now?
As an air hostess, Laura often had to make stopovers in the United Arab Emirates. She hated the airport in Dubai, where she felt she became nothing more than a slab of meat on display in the eyes of the potbellied ex-Bedouins, Rolexes dripping casually from their wrists. She felt swallowed up by the shops in the tax-haven hypermarket. After her last trip there, she had brought Ahmed back a present for the first time: one of those tiny iPods, onto which she had uploaded her favorite music. Ahmed hasn’t touched it for three months. He digs it out, puts in the earphones, and hits the play button. Somehow there’s still a bit of battery left. The warm voice of Dinah Washington: “It’s Magic.” Deep down he feels a little doorway opening, one that has been hermetically sealed for so long he had forgotten it even existed. A doorway to tears. The effect of the voice, the music is magic. He weeps like a four-year-old. He thinks of his first memory—his mother taking him in her arms to console him after he’d been hit by a bigger boy. It’s the only image of her he has left. The only one. Perhaps the odd bit of tenderness had managed to survive the whirlpool of her madness. Maybe, but it left without a trace. How wonderful it was to let himself go to her. How wonderful it is to let himself go now, with this soft music filling his ears. Tears stream down his cheeks. Behind the singer’s voice those violins are so sweet, the backing vocals oozing . . . He is weeping freely now. He doesn’t know what’s come over him. Laura . . . Laura . . . What could I have done? Come now. Not the time for futile soul-searching. You will find the killer, and you will get your life back. And she will find peace. Finally. Now sleep. Dream!
With the volume turned right down, Ahmed closes his eyes and sinks into the world of Laura. Sleep. Thirty-six hours of sound left in the little gem.